The copperplate or English round handwriting style has a great inclination with extensions of ascending and descenders strokes, widely ornate. Colomby is a contemporary calligraphic font with classical roots, based on an 18th-century English manuscript. It is carefully designed, with a special emphasis on the connection of the letters, with high ascenders to give rise to the ornaments of the different letters. There is a special search for high readability. In addition, a wide selection of alternates and ligatures is included, to preserve the qualities of handwriting, in order to accommodate various design aesthetics.

Brokefold Sans, is a Sans Serif font with combination of rounded and strong edges. It's suited to cover various of tasks such as editorial to brand design, advertising, magazine layout and many more. Brokefold consists with plenty OpenType features to ease your tasks. Brokefold comes with all uppercase shapes. However, it comes with complete characters as well as international characters. Features: - Standard Characters (Uppercase) - Numerals - Punctuations - International Characters Disclaimer: Clips arts shown in the posters/images are not included. It is for promotional purpose. Enjoy designing and stay Safe! Tigadestd

The starting point for CA Slalom was the aspiration to create a contemporary interpretation of classics like Gill and Antique Olive in terms of aesthetics, flexibility and usefulness. The outstanding S soon became the visual hook and starting from the extra bold extended weight, CA Slalom evolved into a huge family with four widths. It’s rather round instead of squarely with stroke-ends pulled deep and a relatively low x-height. This gives CA Slalom a taste of its own, and although it is clearly contemporary, it has the potential to become a classic.

Anteb font family is one of those large and useful families that you really can’t miss if you are looking for typeface combining originality and legibility. Anteb is one of these – a sans serif with modern look designed very smart with rounded corners. It is developed in 10 separate weights ranging from Thin to ExtraBlack, each coming with Alternate version, which is well suited for a variety of typographic applications such as headlines and small texts. The Anteb font family supports multiple languages and is available as both webfont and desktop font.

"Bolde Galde" is a cute display font characterized by thick and rounded letterforms, making it a great choice for design projects aimed at children, such as children's games, book covers, and any projects related to schools. With its playful and friendly appearance, this font adds a touch of whimsy and charm to your designs, making them more engaging and enjoyable for young audiences. The simplicity and clarity of "Bolde Galde" make it easy to read and understand, making it an excellent choice for educational materials and other projects aimed at young learners.

Gatsby SF portrays the formal elegance of Art Deco, using the rounded shapes typical of the Art Deco movement. The upper case characters are decorated with a classical Art Deco motif, while lower case characters have been left unadorned for increased readability. Gatsby SF functions well as a display font and creates attention-attracting headers and subheaders. Fully professional, Gatsby SF contains a full character set - Upper and Lower case, all numerals, punctuation, symbols and accented characters. It is suitable for layout work in all major European languages.

Gutenberg Gotisch is a redesign of an inhouse font released by Bauer in 1885, and it is a predecessor of Princess Engraved. So both fonts make a perfect match. The long s can be reached by typing the integral sign or turning the round s into the long s by using the historical OT feature. In this font, you have the possibility to turn I, V, X, L, C, D, and M into Roman numerals by activating the salt feature. Finally I recommend to use both ligature features.

With Outbacker you're not just getting a typical a-z font. You're getting a font that has over 100 alternate glyphs, so that you can use the font to write phrases a ton of different ways. So, if you're looking for the perfect 'R', you have 6 additional options to choose from in addition to what's programmed for the default uppercase and lowercase characters. Choose more sharp characters if you're going for something more aggressive, or more rounded characters if you want something with more of a laid back flow.

Imagine having a formula for sunshine. I mean, in a way to make the sun shine when you want it, or really need it. That could be for a day at the beach, or for the plants in your garden - or even better: make someone happy with a little bit of sunshine! I made this font on the first day of summer in Denmark 2020 - the rounded corners and the soft and easy look of Sunshine Formula, really got me into the "this-is-going-to-be-a-great-summer" mode! :)

The compendium Alphabete: ein Schriftaltas von A bis Z listed the pattern for this family of faces under the name Chicago which, owing to the number of other faces using the same name, makes its origins difficult to ascertain. Nonetheless, its soft lines and round forms have a timeless appeal makes this family an excellent choice for both headlines and text use. Both versions of this font include the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets, along with localization for Lithuanian, Moldovan, Romanian and Turkish.

Darksoul is a blackletter font in the retro style. Elegant and rounded, it adds a bold touch to your projects and will inspire you to create something unique and modern. This font is also equipped with alternative characters, and multi-language support. Font is ideal for headings, flyers, greeting cards, product packaging, book covers, printed quotes, logotype, apparel design, and album covers. Features : Lowercase & Uppercase numbers and punctuation multilingual alternates PUA encoded Please contact us if you have any questions. Enjoy Crafting and thanks for supporting us! :) Thank you

Inspired by the 70's design, specially on Herb Lubalin's work, the typeface Garoa is a rounded mechanical display font without optical compensations, ideal for large bodies. The medium weight has lower case for short texts, and the Bold versions have singular upper case glyphs, with some alternates (at least one alternate per letter – some with OpenType features some using caps on the keyboard). The Garoa Hacker Clube Bold version is free and contains no OpenType features, but the glyphs have the same design as on Garoa Bold.

Karl Georg Hoefer’s Sho first appeared in 1992 with Linotype-Hell. The font is a part of the package Calligraphy for Print, which also contains Ruling Script and Wiesbaden Swing. Calligraphy for Print 2 completes the set. These packages offer modern calligraphy fonts particularly well-suited to use in posters, magazines and advertisements. Sho distinguishes itself in the extreme contrast between the strokes. A unique characteristic of the font is the way it uses simple round forms in some of its letters, giving it a peppy and playful feel.

"Back Jones" is a cute display font characterized by thick and rounded letterforms, making it a great choice for design projects aimed at children, such as children's games, book covers, and any projects related to schools. With its playful and friendly appearance, this font adds a touch of whimsy and charm to your designs, making them more engaging and enjoyable for young audiences. The simplicity and clarity of "Back Jones" make it easy to read and understand, making it an excellent choice for educational materials and other projects aimed at young learners.

Dritch. is a mystical font with a unique and modern geometric style. It is suitable for logos, quotes, social media posts, film titles and stationary. It works with different themes such as mystical, tribal, ethnic, magical, and fantasy. Enjoy! is a fresh, geometric, sans-serif font family. The geometric, near-monoline construction lends a classic durability, tempered by softened edges and vibrant shapes. Friendly and charismatic in lowercase; sophisticated and authoritative in uppercase. Hard lines and sharp corners mesh with smooth, rounded letterforms, while humanist nuances add warmth

Sola is a simplistic, stylish, and modern san serif type font with the unique addition of rounded corners. When creating this font, Bank Gothic originally influenced me, however when I made the square shapes lower case the font didn't retain its sophistication, so it was designed narrower. The result is this warm and soft looking font that works for all types of design, from posters and fliers to logos and business cards. Sola also features standard ligature, stylistic alternates, titling characters with extended width, and a set of standard pictograms.

MB Narrow is a very compressed display font that comes in three weights. with is full use of the 20 stylistic sets it gives the user a lot of scope to how it look. without using them it has a very rounded and geometric look but with alternates for the Capital A, M, N, V, W, X, Y and the lowercase a, f, g, v, w, x & y you can create a more traditional 'movie poster' look. with standard & discretional ligatures and oldstyle figures there are plenty of opentype features.

Korb is a rounded sans serif family of four styles. It features a narrow geometric construction inspired by DIN letter shapes along with more unusual details like open counters and smooth connections between shoulders and stems. This makes the family suitable for a variety of applications, from corporate design to signalization. The fonts, provided in OpenType format, include diacritics for most European languages, a set of arrows and a variety of OpenType features like stylistic alternates, case-sensitive forms, tabular figures, etc. Check the pdf specimen in the gallery tab for more info.

Introducing a new collection of retro display fonts. Blastvader is a reverse contrast retro display font. The glyphs have a fat rounded shape. It's ideal for headlines, flyers, posters, greeting cards, product packaging, book covers, logotypes, and album covers, among other things. Ensuring carefully crafted styles result from the use of this font. The alternates in this font can add more fun to your projects. Its imperfections keep it casual while still providing legibility. Features: Total 209 Glyph Uppercase Numerals & Punctuation Alternates Multilanguage Supports 60+ Latin based languages

The Fuel Uni Extended typefaces are a modern update on the techno sans extended for stronger impact, adding further versatility with unicase design complete with soft rounded corners as well as decorative inktraps. Stylistic Alternates included within all styles are alternates for the capital B, E, and R, as well as lowercase g characters, as well as all of their accented siblings. The Fuel Complete package bundles all of the dynamic styles of the Fuel, Fuel Extended, Fuel Uni, Fuel Uni Extended, and Fuel Script typefaces into one powerhouse of a collection.

Agger is a contemporary serif typeface featuring large open counters, curved, round forms, creating a modern and elegant glyph set. The extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes gives Agger a harmonic and stylish look. Designed with an elegance to the letterforms, the font is adapt for the beauty and the cosmetic industry, giving each project a unique style and feel. Agger is perfectly suited for editorial design, branding, magazines, logos, headings, and more. The family Latin supports Western, Central, South Eastern, South American, Oceanian, Pan African, Vietnamese, and Sámi.

Designed by Olivier Gourvat in 2014, Filson Pro is a new geometric sans serif family with versatility in mind. With its 575 glyphs and its round aspect, this typeface covers all kind of graphic and web design projects. This font family contains 16 fonts from Thin to Black with a professional range of Opentype functions such as pro kerning,lining and oldstyle figures, stylistic alternates, case sensitive forms, localized forms and f-ligatures. For better typographic control, Filson Pro also includes Opentype class kerning with thousands of kerning pairs.

Durazno y Amor is a cursive font family. It is inspired by love, hearts, and Chilean script. It can be written in Aymara, Mapuche and Rapa Nui from Chile. It can also be written in Dutch, Maltese, and other languages. This font family is cute and fun. It has many heart decorations. The strokes are drawn with a round cap tool, with no contrast. The form is upright. Parts A have capitals with high starts. Parts B have capitals with low starts. Parts F are Final forms. Parts U are love line Unions.

Hi, I'm Migaela. I'm optimistic, inspiring and expressive typeface. My friend told me I'm cheerful, positive and charming. My designer made me with three optional style, Regular, Overlap and Smooth (rounded), each with oblique version. It has unique stylistic and ornament. Don't you see that lowercase I with snow flake. It's so cute isn't it. Before I forget, kindly look my ligature, I know you like it. Buy me know, let me works together in your Christmas project, Holiday card, New Years event, and of course your next Valentine project.

An original text and display type family was designed for ParaType in 2008 by Manvel Shmavonyan to be used together with Susan and Susan Classic, earlier released type families by the same author. This is a low-contrast sans serif font with open letterforms. Its shape is distinguished by rounded upper parts of lower case. Susan, Susan Classic and Susan Sans forms a super family coordinated on weight, style and proportions. Susan Sans is well suited for short and middle range text composing as well as for use in advertising and display typography.

Linotype Pide Nashi is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the entries of the Linotype-sponsored International Digital Type Design Contests of 1994 and 1997. German artist Verena Gerlach created a typeface which looks almost like Arabic at the first glance, only with the second do the familiar forms become clear. Rounded lower case letters, generous, sweeping capitals and diamond-shaped ornaments give the font its Arabic feel. The exotic Linotype Pide Nashi is best suited for short and middle length texts and headlines and especially for ornamental texts.

Boutros Angham is a humanist-inspired, sans-serif typeface designed and created to work harmoniously with its Latin version whilst respecting Arabic calligraphic and cultural rules. Characterized by its modern appearance, with rounded edges and free flowing letterforms, Boutros Angham is highly legible at various angles, sizes and distances. Ascenders and descenders are very prominent and apertures are wide to easily distinguish letters from one another. Boutros Angham is suitable for headlines and sub-headings as well as body text at smaller point sizes. There are ten weights for each, Latin and Arabic, variant.

An interesting hand lettered example of Art Deco lettering (minus the letter ‘L’) was spotted on Pinterest and served as the inspiration for Deco Sketch JNL. Because there was no attribution as to the age or source of the alphabet, it can only be surmised that it was a scan from a 1930s or 1940s source. The original showed many of the irregularities of pen lettering, and had rounded terminals. The digital version has been redrawn more uniformly with flat terminals. Deco Sketch JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

FF Neuwelt™, from Jens Gehlhaar, is open, inviting, highly legible, and strikingly handsome. Combining the straightforward clarity of a geometric sans with a welcoming warmth, FF Neuwelt’s eight display and text weights, vast range of alternates and extended character set, make for a family with few limitations. While grounded in a solid geometric sans serif foundation, Gehlhaar has drawn a large suite of alternate characters that infuses FF Neuwelt with softened, and ultimately easy on the eyes, humanistic shapes and proportions. Alternative cursive italic forms and a choice of round or square punctuation are also available at the click of a mouse. FF Neuwelt is spaced for sizes larger than 16 point, while FF Neuwelt Text has more open letterspacing to set perfectly at sizes smaller than 16 point. In addition, five key lowercase characters were drawn with more legible shapes. The result is that FF Neuwelt adapts from text to larger sizes and one stylistic mien to another with ease and grace. FF Neuwelt is a natural for interactive design, performing well on both large digital displays and small screens. Counters are generous and apertures are open, making them a perfect choice when setting text as microcopy or in short blocks where quick and accurate comprehension is the goal. Even the heaviest weights translate well to on-screen reading. FF Neuwelt also speaks with authority in large sizes on big screens. Equally at home in print environments, FF Neuwelt is a perfect choice for long-form text, captions, editorial, packaging, point-of-purchase design – as well as extensive branding projects. Its many choices of alternative characters make for a design that draws the reader in, without overpowering the message. Although he has drawn typefaces in addition to FF Neuwelt, Gehlhaar is primarily a filmmaker. Directing commercials with style and grace, his work includes spots for Nissan, Apple, Emirates Airlines and Microsoft. As a creative director, Gehlhaar has worked on a broad range of projects for Coca-Cola, MTV, EPSN, Volkswagen and more.

A vintage hand-punched brass stencil for the Pasadena Playhouse spotted online was the basis for Theatrical Stencil JNL. Slight variations in the letter forms from other similar designs might not quickly be noticed, but there is always a charm in the hand-made look of any stenciled lettering.

Breaking the cycle of homelessness We are partnered with The House of St. Barnabas, a private members club in Soho Square, whose work as a not for profit charity aims to break the cycle of homelessness in London. Each purchase (of the family pack) comes with a one month membership to The House and 100% of the proceeds from sales of fonts go directly to the charity to help their essential work. This unique collection of 7 typefaces is based on the disappearing signs of Soho, at risk of being lost forever due to the ever changing landscape of the area. By re-imaging the signage as complete fonts, we have rescued this rich visual history from the streets and present the typefaces into a contemporary context for a bright optimistic future. FS Berwick Thanks to its humble tiled origins, this Egyptian serif type maintains a uniform character width, creating the irregular letter proportions found in the final alphabet. Broad-shouldered, the bracketed serifs firmly ground the font, whilst its extreme hairlines become a necessity due to the uniform width. Of note is the upside down ‘S’, to be found on the original sign on Berwick Street. Perhaps due to its ceramic origins, there is a surprising ‘slippiness’ to its final appearance. FS Cattle Cattle & Son is best described as a wide, but not overly extended, grotesque-style sans serif, showing a uniform width and carrying a robust strength to its form. Whilst lightly functional overall, the purposeful diagonal legs of the ‘K’, ‘R’ and the tail of the ‘Q’ add an urgency to its appearance. The reduced size of the ampersand gives away Cattle & Son’s hand-painted origins, and the oblique compacted ‘LTD’ found on the original sign is also included in the final set. This beautiful sign is tucked away under an arch in Portland Mews, sheltering from the weather. Perhaps this is why it has lasted so long. FS Century This somewhat elongated set of Roman capitals was originally rendered in paint circa 1940, but its roots trace back to the Trajan Column in Rome. Witness the slightly unbalanced ‘W’ and the painter’s hand is revealed. Century’s flared serif style is extremely short, sharp and bracketed. The ‘M’ is splayed and has no top serifs. Century has a uniform appearance of width, probably due to its sign-written origins. Yet is elegant, classic and exudes sophistication. FS Charity A true Tuscan letterform, the original is located on The House of St. Barnabas in ceramic tiles and was revealed in all its broken glory in 2014. FS Charity retains the option of using these incorrect characters (try typing lowercase in the test drive above and compare with the more uniform uppercase characters). FS Charity features fishtailed terminals on its strokes, a curious branched ‘T’ and the ‘S’ displays tear-drop ends to its serifs. Almost uniform in width, the ‘A’, ‘M’ and ‘W’ are the widest characters in this set. FS Marlborough The elongated Marlborough features diagonal terminals to some characters and numerals. Also retained is the space-saving contracted ‘T’ glyph from the original sign, while the ‘R’ features a distinctive wedge-shaped leg. Highly individual in this form, similar signage appears around Soho, but featuring a variety of widths in their design. FS Portland The sister type to Cattle & Son, Portland is oblique rather than italic. The serifs are not overly long, yet still enhance its rather rigid cap height and baseline appearance. Its ‘A’ has a top serif, the ‘M’ is square and the ‘G’ foregoes any spur. Particularly delightful is the open ampersand. Numerals align to encourage the horizontal flavour of the oblique style. Overall, Portland is both confident and graceful. FS St James A lineal Continental style, St James also displays a true sense of ‘Londoness’ in its titling form, perhaps influenced by early Underground signage. Irregular letterforms display a continental flavour, particularly evident in its Deco style ‘W’, ampersand and numerals. The rather high cross bar in the ‘A’ is also reflected in the raised middle strokes of the ‘M’. Noteworthy are the distinctive unions found on all of the characters and the additional small caps. The original lettering is still located on Greek St.

Archiva Regular - Archiva Italic - Archiva Bold - Archiva Bold Rounded - Archiva Wide Rounded - Archiva Dropline - Archiva Stencil - Archiva Worn - Archiva Outline is the eighth font family created by American Graphic Designer Tom Nikosey. Tom specializes in lettering, typographic design & illustration for branding and trademarks. New from CozyFonts Foundry. Archiva was designed to maximize limited horizontal space reserved for text, type, or headlines, titles and label wording. The Archiva Family is perfect for Labels, headlines, ads and especially signage. The 9 members of the Archiva Font Family maintain a consistency and likeness to each other in form and dynamics but yet each member of the family has it’s own individual personality. Archiva derived from the word archival or place where records are kept. Archiva is the Greek word for Archive. The x-height and organized glyph consistency enables the user to keep files organized and clean much like an archive. Caps and numbers work extremely well together also. There are over 300 glyphs contained in each of the 9 variations of Archiva© by CozyFonts and they work in over 70 Languages. Please visit my website or Google Tom Nikosey for more info on his illustrious career. CozyFonts is Tom's intro into the world of font design.

Drakoni Sans is a bold and rounded font that exudes a strict and angular aesthetic. Its clean lines and subtle curves give it a humanist touch, making it perfect for a wide range of designs. Designed with a vision of comic book headlines, Drakoni Sans is both playful and professional. Its bold and powerful presence commands attention, while its rounded edges and angled cuts add a touch of personality and charm. Available in four styles - Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic - Drakoni Sans offers versatility and flexibility for any project. Its clean and clear letterforms make it ideal for logos, headlines, and other display purposes. Whether you're looking to add a touch of softness to your designs or to create a bold and commanding presence, Drakoni Sans is the font for you. The font is built with advanced OpenType functionality and has a guaranteed top-notch quality, containing stylistic and contextual alternates, ligatures and more features; all to give you full control and customizability. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages, from Northern Europe to South Africa, from America to South-East Asia. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

Download PDF Specimen Created as a display typeface in 2012 by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Cocogoose is one of Zetafonts most loved typefaces. A sans serif typeface of geometric proportions, with very low contrast and slightly rounded corners, it was the first typeface to be produced in the Coco series, an ongoing research on the design variation in gothic typefaces through the ages. Cocogoose extreme x-height and ultrabold weight (with regular being comparable to heavy weights of other typefaces), have since then made it very popular for effective display and logo use, also thanks to decorative versions like Cocogoose Letterpress. Since 2016, Andrea Tartarelli has been improving the typeface expanding the original glyph set to include cyrillic and greek and adding extra weights, widths, and italics to the original family range, and bringing Cocogoose to an impressive count of 52 variants. In 2019, Francesco Canovaro has teamed with Andrea Tartarelli and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini to create a new variant subfamily: Cocogoose Classic, featuring 8 weights and matching italics. Cocogoose Classic keeps the original design for uppercase characters while developing a new design for lowercase, with a smaller x-height, round dots and expanded open-type features, including positional numerals, alternate forms, and extended ligatures and bringing the glyph count to over 1000 characters.

Distorted fonts are great but are mostly not very practical - 360 is an attempt to create a simple distorted font that can be used far beyond a few logos or headlines. Each 360 character averages roughly half the number of sharp angles of a regular sans serif. This gives it an unusually fresh and timeless appeal and creates a dynamic presence across body text that is very legible and compact without looking overly condensed. 360 was chosen as a name because it can be used as an everyday font, all year round, and because 360 has so many unusual angles that don't conform to normal font conventions. 360 also happens to be a cool number: 360 makes a highly composite number. 360 is also a superior highly composite number and a colossally abundant number. A circle is divided into 360 degrees for the purpose of angular measurement. 360° is also called round angle. 360 is a convenient standard since, 360 being highly composite, it allows a circle to be divided into equal segments with each segment measured in integer degrees rather than fractional degrees. 360 is the sum of a twin prime (179 + 181). A year is roughly calculated as 360 days.

Clean, crisp, rational, familiar, modern… serifed. Positype Scotch reaches back to history just enough to produce something warm and easy on the eyes. No corners were cut, no quick tricks… this type suite was drawn for specificity: Text, Display, and Deck… ALL in 3 widths that now include Condensed and Compressed. Each unique, each inter-connected, each part of the whole. Scotch Text is offered in 6 weights with matching true italics. Drawn for economy and an easy read, the family is a workhorse for long-passage text settings. 4 sets of numerals, well-proportioned small caps, and a plethora of extras round out each font. Scotch Display is not just a thinner version of Scotch Text wrapped in a higher contrast. Display sports shorter ascenders and descenders, a unique footprint, great contrast, and a more folded, calligraphic italics. Display subtly oozes sophistication and provides an attractive, exhuberant companion to Scotch Text. Scotch Deck rounds out the offering by choosing to be specific to its offering. Deck utlitizes traits and proportions shared between Text and Display, but alters its overall mass to balance out the needs for settings that require subheadlines, callouts and other similar uses. Essentially, something not so high-contrast and not so stress dense that works great for middle-sizes.

Rian Hughes’ 15th collection of fonts, “112 Hours”, is entirely dedicated to numbers. Culled from a myriad of sources – clock faces, tickets, watches house numbers – it is an eclectic and wide-ranging set. Each font contains only numerals and related punctuation – no letters. A new book has been designed by Hughes to show the collection, and includes sample settings, complete character sets, source material and an introduction. This is available print-to-order on Blurb in paperback and hardback: http://www.blurb.com/b/5539073-112-hours-hardback http://www.blurb.com/b/5539045-112-hours-paperback From the introduction: The idea for this, the fifteenth Device Fonts collection, began when I came across an online auction site dedicated to antique clocks. I was mesmerized by the inventive and bizarre numerals on their faces. Shorn of the need to extend the internal logic of a typeface through the entire alphabet, the designers of these treasures were free to explore interesting forms and shapes that would otherwise be denied them. Given this horological starting point, I decided to produce 12 fonts, each featuring just the numbers from 1 to 12 and, where appropriate, a small set of supporting characters — in most cases, the international currency symbols, a colon, full stop, hyphen, slash and the number sign. 10, 11 and 12 I opted to place in the capital A, B and C slots. Each font is shown in its entirety here. I soon passed 12, so the next logical finish line was 24. Like a typographic Jack Bauer, I soon passed that too -— the more I researched, the more I came across interesting and unique examples that insisted on digitization, or that inspired me to explore some new design direction. The sources broadened to include tickets, numbering machines, ecclesiastical brass plates and more. Though not derived from clock faces, I opted to keep the 1-12 conceit for consistency, which allowed me to design what are effectively numerical ligatures. I finally concluded one hundred fonts over my original estimate at 112. Even though it’s not strictly divisible by 12, the number has a certain symmetry, I reasoned, and was as good a place as any to round off the project. An overview reveals a broad range that nonetheless fall into several loose categories. There are fairly faithful revivals, only diverging from their source material to even out inconsistencies and regularize weighting or shape to make them more functional in a modern context; designs taken directly from the source material, preserving all the inky grit and character of the original; designs that are loosely based on a couple of numbers from the source material but diverge dramatically for reasons of improved aesthetics or mere whim; and entirely new designs with no historical precedent. As projects like this evolve (and, to be frank, get out of hand), they can take you in directions and to places you didn’t envisage when you first set out. Along the way, I corresponded with experts in railway livery, and now know about the history of cab side and smokebox plates; I travelled to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Nantes, France, to examine their numbering machines; I photographed house numbers in Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam and here in the UK; I delved into my collection of tickets, passes and printed ephemera; I visited the Science Museum in London, the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset, and the Museum of London to source early adding machines, war-time telegraphs and post-war ration books. I photographed watches at Worthing Museum, weighing scales large enough to stand on in a Brick Lane pub, and digital station clocks at Baker Street tube station. I went to the London Under-ground archive at Acton Depot, where you can see all manner of vintage enamel signs and woodblock type; I photographed grocer’s stalls in East End street markets; I dug out old clocks I recalled from childhood at my parents’ place, examined old manual typewriters and cash tills, and crouched down with a torch to look at my electricity meter. I found out that Jane Fonda kicked a policeman, and unusually for someone with a lifelong aversion to sport, picked up some horse-racing jargon. I share some of that research here. In many cases I have not been slavish about staying close to the source material if I didn’t think it warranted it, so a close comparison will reveal differences. These changes could be made for aesthetic reasons, functional reasons (the originals didn’t need to be set in any combination, for example), or just reasons of personal taste. Where reference for the additional characters were not available — which was always the case with fonts derived from clock faces — I have endeavored to design them in a sympathetic style. I may even extend some of these to the full alphabet in the future. If I do, these number-only fonts could be considered as experimental design exercises: forays into form to probe interesting new graphic possibilities.

Patent Reclame manages to be light-hearted, while clearly showing its blackletter roots both in the shape of the individual letters and the rhythm of text on a page. The designer is unknown. Schriftgeisserei Flinsch of Frankfurt a.M. cast the face around 1895. Nicolete Gray shows a quite similar face called “Graphic,” from Stephenson Blake in 1896. Personally, I don't think that Patent Reclame looks like an English design, but I do not have any proof one way or the other. The numbers are proportional, intended for posters, not spreadsheets. Two ornaments are included, an art nouveau rose at #172 and a lilypad with long tendril at #177. Great for invitations, posters and flyers announcing fun events. Do not use for obituaries. Quite readable in smaller sizes for short blocks of text. I really like the buoyant quality -- a nice combination of discipline and enthusiasm.