Elbow Grease was made with, yes, you’ve guessed it: Elbow Grease! It started off as a grungy font, but it didn’t look right, so I reworked all the glyphs. Then I forgot to save the font, so I had to start all over again. Naming a font was never this easy! Elbow Grease is a didone-ish font with some seriously warped glyphs, a lot of panache and a ‘get-it-done’ attitude. Also comes with a toolkit full of diacritics.

Bluenote is a font based on Franklin Gothic condensed. In the 60s and 70s the record label Blue Note published all those classic jazz records of my youth. Someone at their arts department cut letters to ribbons and designed wonderful record covers with those fragmented glyphs. I recently had a look at my music collection and rediscovered these letters. Being a hard-working type designer I couldn't resist the challenge, here is the result from your dilligent designer Gert Wiescher

In a career spanning the early 1900s through 1940, George M. Cohan wrote and produced over 50 plays, 300 songs and was also an actor, singer and dancer. Many of his works honored his Irish roots, and the cover of one piece of sheet music called “The Irish American” (1905) had its title hand lettered in a condensed Art Nouveau type design with tiny spurred serifs. This is now available digitally as Dress Rehearsal JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

During the investigation of the infamous murders in Whitechapel, police received several letters allegedly from Jack the Ripper. Of the hundreds received, the so-called, “Dear Boss” letter actually included some details of a crime that had yet to be committed. Soon after, the information in this letter would be corroborated at a crime scene. This font was inspired by the handwriting in that letter. It includes dozens of European characters…and just might be the writing of Jack himself!

Samuel Welo was a sign painter who had published in the 1920s and again in 1960 editions of his “Studio Handbook – Letter and Design for Artists and Advertisers”. In-between, in 1930 Welo also published “Lettering - Practical and Foreign”. Within the pages is an Art Deco outline slab serif design using multiple thin lines to create an “incised” or “engraved” look within the characters. This intriguing type style is now available as Guest Invitation JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

For some reason I had to think of Moby Dick (the classic book by Herman Melville) when I was busy working on this font. No, I don’t live near the sea, nor do I have a pet whale. It’s just one of those things… Whalebone (named after Captain Ahab’s prosthetic leg) is a handmade, all caps brush font. It wasn’t actually made with a brush; I used a broken satay skewer and Chinese ink. Whalebone comes with discretionary ligatures for double letter combinations.

Minora is a contemporary sans serif type family of three weights. Glyphs with open, plain and reduced forms are attributes of Minora. Several OpenType features allow different figure sets, fractions and more. Minora had its beginning in 2007 during Alex Meier’s Typedesign study (CAS Typedesign) at the ZHdK in Zurich (Switzerland). After graduation, Alex Meier continued working on this project in a shared studio with his former fellow student Dominique Kerber . He completed this fully developed font in April 2011.

Clair De Lune is part of the famous Suite Bergamasque, written by Claude Debussy in 1890, and published in 1905. It means Moonlight in French, a kind of romantic name. The name is exactly what I had in mind for this übercute font. Clair De Lune can be used to design postcards and posters, liven up websites and give your designs an overall happy feel. Clair De Lune was handmade using a 0.5 pen, eco friendly Italian paper and a wooden kitchen table.

I was listening to an Opeth album called Blackwater Park. By the time I had decided that this font needed some swirls, the band was playing a song called The Drapery Falls - which has the word ‘spiraling’ in it (see poster 2) - and the name was born. Spiraling down is a surprisingly elegant font (given its roughness). I probably wouldn’t set a whole text in it, but it will really stand out as a titling font for packaging or book covers.

Trigomy is a proportional pixel font designed on a 5 pixel grid. It is intended for either very small text or as huge display font for posters and the like. To get a crisp look this font should be used at 10 pt or multiples of 10 pt. (A tip for Adobe Creative Suite applications is to change the standard anti-aliasing method from “sharp” to “crisp” and to align the text to whole pixels. Also avoid centered text.) To get started with type design I thought it was best to start with a pixel font because you don't have to focus much on the design itself, but rather have to focus on how kerning and spacing works and the various features you can implement with OpenType. And of course I wanted to have a pixel font that had all that I was missing from other pixel fonts. We were learning trigonometry at the time I started designing Trigomy, and most of the time I misspoke it “trigometry”. So, when I had to come up with a name for my first font I thought: "Why not go with Trigomy?"

After a lot of time sitting at my desk, creating fonts and trying to figure out how my new software works, I really like to work out a bit. The only thing that I do not like is the music they play at the gym; it is usually a selection of poppy tunes that appeals to a large audience. But not to me. I prefer my death metal - and eighties music, as it brings back a lot of good memories. So, I bought myself some ear buds and installed a music streaming app on my phone. Yes, I know, I am probably the last person on earth who discovered streaming... One day, during a workout session, I listened to a list of eighties music and one song that I had forgotten about started playing: Rappers Delight by The Sugarhill Gang. When I started working on the font, I had to think about the song and named it Square Beat. Square Beat font, other than the name implies, is a rounded, handmade font, ideally suited for books and magazines aimed at a young audience, toy packaging or posters. It comes with great language support, including Vietnamese.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.

Italian type design master Aldo Novarese was not famous for making calligraphic designs, nor had he any interest in them. He is much better known for his text faces, and quite innovative sans serif and decorative designs which became the definition of what we now know as techno and modern. But in 1968, Novarese surprised everyone with a fantastic flowing deco script entitled Elite. Novarese's formula of simple soft curves and toned-down swashes makes for one of the most unique alphabets ever seen, not to mention one of the best flowing and most legible scripts. This is now its digital incarnation, named Fontella. Fontella's applications are virtually limitless. This is the sort of script that can feel at home pretty much anywhere; a sign, a fridge magnet, a bumper sticker, a greeting card, a movie poster, a book cover, music artwork, magazine ads, newsletter headlines, etc. Digitized from original specimen and expanded with a few built-in alternates and ligatures by Rebecca Alaccari, the font was named after the famed jazz singer Fontella Bass. These letters are just so sweet they had to be called Fontella.

The curves are vintage and the serifs are big. They're so big that for years I never had the courage to tackle this intimidating font. But when fellow signmaker Frank Smith laid the groundwork for this intriguing typeface by Frank H. Atkinson, I couldn't pass on the opportunity to take it from paper to keyboard. After all, at over 100 years old, I felt this alphabet had never been given a proper, digital treatment. So how did this face survive the last century? Well, for those who don't know the history, it survived in Atkinson's ubiquitous book, Sign Painting, published first in 1908, the generational standard for anyone interested in sign-related type design. The layouts and lettering treatments in this book have influenced countless designers for more than a hundred years, but most haunting to me was this strange face with the big serifs. Well, I'm haunted no more. The work is done, the kerning is complete, and nothing but a mouse-click separates a very old idea from the modern world. It's wide, it's big, and with those crazy serifs, it is definitely eccentric-!!!

The typeface “Hand Stamp Slab Serif Rough” was designed for the Typo Graphic Design font foundry in 2017 by Manuel Viergutz. It is a display font with a classic slab serifs based on real rubber stamp letters for a authentic, rough & dirty, stamped-by-hand appearance. It provides a vintage look through state-of-the-art Open Type features such as contextual alternates that cycle automatically through 5 different letter variants for each character to create a varied look, just as if the letters were stamped by hand. The font is intended for use in logos, magazines, posters, advertisements, and as a webfont for decorative headlines. The font works best for display sizes. There are 1031 glyphs with 5× A–Z, 0–9 & a–z and 70+ decorative extras like arrows, dingbats, symbols, geometric shapes, catchwords, and many alternative letters. A range of figure set options including oldstyle figures and additional deco­ra­tive liga­tures (type the word “love” for ❤ … ), Ver­sal Eszett (German Capital Sharp S), symbols, and emojis. Have fun with this font & use the DEMO-FONT (with a reduced glyph-set) FREE!

Following the huge success of Legendary, Manuel Corradine proudly introduces his new ornamented script font. He remarks: “Designing Plebeya was a very tough and exhausting process, but learning to use it correctly and harnessing its whole potential is equally a job demanding great skill and dedication”. Plebeya is a font with an elegant and decorative style. Its calligraphic strokes are full of minute imperfections evoking real hand writing and provide it with a rustic and natural touch. Because of this we advise to preferably use it in the smaller sizes and only in larger ones when consciously you want to highlight its rustic characteristics. Plebeya is ideal for logos and short texts design, but can also be very useful in a wide variety of applications like wedding invitations, magazines, restaurant menus, advertisement and in any project requiring a touch of elegance and exclusivity. Its wide set of alternative ornated characters make Plebeya Pro an excellent tool for both the professional designer as well as any enthusiast wishing to elaborate a project with unique style.