The 1946 foreign publication entitled "100 Alphabets Publicitaires" ("100 Advertising Alphabets") collects a number of interesting and attractive lettering samples for design inspiration. One such example is Asian-inspired and was re-drawn as the digital type face now named Martial Arts JNL.

Based heavily on Gill especially in the mid weights, Astoria has a subtle top left serif which makes it not quite a Roman and not quite a Sans. Designed specifically as a text face it still works very well as a headline font.

The two Wetetque faces are dual-line fonts made with simple lines. The family has two styles and is caps only, but the lower case in each style is different from the upper case, giving the family has four sets of letters.

A set of old die-cut cardboard letters and numbers used by teachers directly on bulletin boards or for tracing was the inspiration for Classroom JNL. In turn, these letters take their cue from typefaces such as Franklin and earlier wood type designs.

The 1897 specimen book from Barnhart Brothers and Spindler showed a enchanting little face called Dotted Roman. Here's a faithful revival, ready to warm up the 21st century. Both versions support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

The 1895 specimen book from American Type Founders included the pattern for this face, originally called Outing—Art Nouveau with a laid-back vibe. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1262, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

Sluggo, a loose, 3D-ish face with the look of a slightly sloppy brush line, comes with attitude to spare. Has five styles: Regular, Lefthook, Righthook, Open, and Black--all spaced and kerned so that you can stack them for special effects.

PhrackSle is a a Fraktur face with a difference: it has a uniform stroke rather than a calligraphic-pen stroke. It comes in four weights: thin, plain, bold, and extrabold. (For a version of the design done with a calligraphic stroke, see PhederFrack.)

Neon Extra Condensed was designed by Giulio da Milano and released in 1935. This all-capital typeface is similar to designs released in the early 1990s. The Neon Extra Condensed font is good as a headline face for magazines and book covers.

Gingar – a headline face, playful and classic – a proper font. Gingar includes swash-characters and ligatures in a wide range of weights from UltraLight to ExtraBlack, plus Italics. Typeface for life, fashion, food, wellness, magazines, corporate design projects and more. Rock with Gingar!

Oksana Greek has only basic Latin and monotonic Greek characters from multilingual Oksana. It has six weights with real italics, and Alt faces with Old Style figures, ampersand, alternative characters -a-g-k-y- and Greek -Ε-Ξ-β-ε-θ-φ-.

Simeon is well suited for setting an short and medium amount of text with an historic impression. OpenType features: - over 650 glyphs - Central European faces - stylistic alternates and historical forms - ornaments, signs, zodiac, symbols - proportional & mediaeval numerals - numerators, denominators and fractions - Roman numerals

A late nineteenth-century type specimen catalog from Farmer, Little & Co. yielded this droll little typeface, originally called "Arbor". The distinctive decorations of the face suggested a fool's cap, and thus the font got its current name. And don't call me Surely.

This is the Bruce Foundry’s Old Style No.20, which was loosely based on the Miller & Richard Old Style. It was recut at Lanston under Sol Hess’ direction in 1909, and survives as the second text face in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue.

Oksana Cyrillic has only basic Latin and european Cyrillic characters from multilingual Oksana. It has six weights with real italics, and Alt faces with Old Style figures, ampersand, alternative characters -a-g-k-y- and Cyrillic -а-в-д-з-у-ў-.

Federal Streamliner was inspired by lettering seen on the side of a 1950s/60s era train. It speaks of the designs of the 'streamline' era and is ideal for retro projects invoking the 30s, 50s or 60s needing a simple distinctive display face.

AngloAngkor is a display face of Western characters inspired by the elegant “round script” style of the Khmer alphabet of Cambodia. It is the first of a projected series inspired by some of the beautiful lesser-known native scripts of Southeast Asia.

An unreleased typeface called "Aragón", designed by Enric Crous-Vidal, provided the inspiration for this decidedly retro face. It’s quite useful for distinctive and commanding headlines. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Pepita was drawn for Monotype in 1959 by Hungarian designer Imre Reiner. It is a brush script face with a lively personality, adding an impulsive feel to informal display purposes. The Pepita font is often chosen for greeting cards, menus, calendars and packaging.

PhederFrack is a calligraphic Fraktur face with three weights and a shadowed version. The shadow of the shadow version is also a separate font and it can be used to overlay the shadowed version, giving the shadow a different color than the letters.

J. M. Bergling, in his 1914 masterwork Art Alphabets and Lettering, offered this face as suitable for all occasions Greek, and we couldn't agree more. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets.

Extremely influenced by the new rave trend, Fiasco is a reflex of it's excesses. Way too many elements, bright neon colors, and that not-knowing-when-to-stop sort of behavior. Acid House aesthetic remixed by the nu school DJs. Neon Flamboyant.

Brandegoris is a set of traditional split-pen capitals with two forms for most of the letters. It is excellent for headers and titles, especially on web pages and also works well as initial characters in combination with a serif text face.

This formal calligraphic face is light, and delicate with beautiful lines and curves. The Pro version adds extra elegance with alternate caps and beginning and ending swashes. Explora has over 600 glyphs and features international languages including the entire Cherokee Nation character set.

Computer is an all-capitals headline font that immediately implies early mainframe computer technology. Although desktop computers and better screen and printer faces have been available for some time, the type style of the Computer font is still used for futuristic topics.

Humanist meets handwriting. Blancmange is a fun and informal face with brushy alternates for the flair when you need it. Swash mannerisms blend with structured letter shapes to give a range of personality. Includes all the requisite OpenType goodies in two weights.

Coen Hofmann revives an original design by Germany type foundry Schriftguss from 1940: His digital Admira is expanded with an extensive open type character set and even provides full Cyrillic. The face is set to best use at point sizes above 24.

FlyHigh is a decorative text face with slab serifs. It comes in eight styles: plain, semibold, bold, extrabold, italic, semibold italic, bold italic, and extrabold italic. Its low x-height makes it more appropriate for uses such as invitations than for book text.

Fleischer is a rough and playful display typeface good for headlines and posters. The face is based on historical letterforms combined with energetic 20th century pulp-style lettering. Fleischer comes with caps and small caps plus West, Central and East European language support.

Phaley is a soft and charming handwritten signature script font that effortlessly exudes elegance and grace. With its delicate curves and timeless beauty, it adds a touch of allure and personality to any design or document, transforming words into works of art.

A further development of the Colosseum range but this with a slab serif. Visually monoline and modern in appearence it still retains its Trajan characteristics. The addition of Spartacus black with its unusual Italic gives a the face a strong original headline font.

Created by Swedish designer Bo Berndal in 1999, Linotype Dala Text can best be described as a softer, friendlier blackletter. Blackletter refers to typefaces that evolve out of Northern Europe's medieval manuscript tradition. Often called gothic, or Old English, these letters are identified by the traces of the wide-nibbed pen stroke within their forms. Linotype Dala Text most resembles the fraktur type of blackletter. Fraktur types were popular text faces in Northern Europe until the 20th century. Inspired by Swedish folklore, this fraktur is much softer and rounder than most examples. Its connection to the Scandinavian folkloric tradition makes Linotype Dala perfectly suited for such texts as fairy tales, medieval stories, and other things that might appeal to a child's sense of adventure. To strengthen the medieval fairy tale look, use Linotype Dala Text together with other elements of the Linotype Dala family: Library's Linotype Dala Pict and Linotype Dala Border. The characters in these two supplementary fonts were inspired by medieval and renaissance folk art, and were also drawn by Bo Berndal, making them a perfect match. All three styles of the Linotype Dala Family are part of the Take Type 4 collection from Linotype GmbH."

FF Cocon’s designer, Evert Bloemsma (1958—2005) described it as a “serious typeface”. Despite first impressions, the description holds up well. Since its 2001 release, FF Cocon has been used in an astoundingly wide variety of design applications. At large sizes, FF Cocon works as a display face, with beautiful detailing. And at small sizes, it remains surprisingly readable. The lowercase letters a, b, d, g, h, m, n, p, q, r and u, were drawn without spurs, as Bloemsma made an attempt to erase every trace of handwriting; even “normal,” neutral sans serif typefaces still retain elements in their letterforms like this. Bloemsma wanted none of it. Although a difficult starting point for a typeface, this proved successful. Bloemsma’s design is a family of rounded yet rather asymmetrical forms with details reminiscent of brush-strokes, but that were not made with a brush in hand. In spite of its claim to seriousness, FF Cocon is a family of seductive, voluptuous styles. The original FF Cocon had two widths—normal and condensed. Later, a more compact Extra Condensed version was introduced, as well as italics.

Diaconia Old Style is a new rendition of my workhorse body copy font that I originally designed to use for the body copy of "Printing in a Digital World." I became increasingly upset with the lack of lowercase numbers and true small caps. Diaconia started life as a modification of one of the Dutch Bible fonts I traced. It has changed a lot since then (although I have a hard time telling how much because I have lost the original). The plain and italic work especially well when used in very large sizes as display faces. The other four variants (small caps, heavy, heavy italic, and black) are designed for use in book production. Because I format all my own books, I was able to design fonts that met my needs exactly: lowercase numbers, SMALL CAPS font, Mac Command, Option, and Control symbols, ballot box in the section slot, and several other special characters. DiaconiaPro is the OpenType family of my body copy workhorse. This is the first font family I ever created: classic, elegant, easy to read. 583 characters: small caps, oldstyle figures, numerators, denominators, lining figures, accents and a lot more.

Hortensia, designed around 1900 by Emil Gursch for his own Berlin foundry, is a typeface most expressive of the post-Victorian aesthetic that was all the rage in both Europe and America during the second half of the 19th century and up until the Great War. It is a reduced aesthetic of sharp points and natural curves that almost want to apologize for their own elegance, but clearly embody the simple excitement about the blossoming of industry and crafts during the period. This deco script trend would get a re-run for about a decade on either side of the second World War — especially in the entertainment and financial industries — before giving way to art nouveau and big brush faces. Hortensia was Gursch's most popular typeface, used extensively and prominently in many beautiful type catalogs, and a commonly seen design element in Germany for quite a while after its release. This digital version brings plenty of fixes and additions to the original metal Hortensia design, including many alternates sprinkled throughout the character set, and support for a wide range of Latin-based languages (including Central European, Baltic, Turkish and Welsh).

Soprani is a unique typeface inspired by a plaque found in New Zealand dating from the 1920s. The design was contemporized and brought 100 years into the future. The serifs are dramatically flared at the end of the stems, while in the middle, they contract. This leads to a unique shimmering effect that draws the eye and catches your user's attention. This typeface meets the demand for unique serif types that are both eye-catching and delicate. It’s a display face that's ideal for very contemporary work. This typeface has plenty of alternates and has a full complement of OpenType features. The 1920s inspire the design, with a bit of art nouveau and arts and crafts, yet the typeface is designed to meet contemporary design requirements. It has a unique elegance and the letterforms are condensed more than most. Soprani is suggested for table books, menus, and various promotional materials, newspapers, television, motion pictures and other media. There is a wide range of widths and weights available, from the thin, which is delicate and graceful, to a bold and robust black. Production assistance by Lucas Azevedo and ikern.

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.

Mousse Script is based on Glenmoy, a 1932 Stephenson Blake typeface. Glenmoy a prime example of what display typography was in pre-WWII American ad art. It graced the pages of magazines, sold numerous products and services, then simply died out when the typographic trends shifted towards the more personalized, stylized and handwritten types of calligraphy. The current trend in typography is a revivalism that brings all of the distinctive display typography of the 20th century, without chronological discrimination, back in the name of ‘retro’. Who are we to deny the masses what they want? Mousse Script doesn’t just bring Glenmoy back from the ashes of the 20th century. It expands upon the limited metal character set nearly twice over and takes advantage of the latest type technologies. This makes Mousse Script a striking typeface, both functionally and visually. A simple, attractive display font on the surface, Mousse Script is unique in its bold upright calligraphy, something rarely found these days. The OpenType version of Mousse Script combines both the regular and alternate character sets into a single, cross-platform package that takes advantage of the extended typographic features of the OpenType format.

In 1995, FontHaus came upon a rare opportunity to create a revival of Aries, a little known and previously unavailable typeface by the legendary Eric Gill. Discovering a lost typeface by one of the major designers of the 20th Century, was the discovery of a buried treasure, and being the first type company to release it was an honor. Thirteen years later, FontHaus came across another little known typeface treasure: Diane. Designed by the legendary French designer Roger Excoffon in 1956, this remarkable script has never been faithfully recreated until now. In close collaboration with Mark Simonson, FontHaus and Mr. Simonson painstakingly researched rare type books, publications, European metal type services, and period showings from the United States, England, Germany and from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Finding full specimens of the font turned out to be quite a challenge. In most cases, only the caps and lowercase were shown. Furthermore, the more we researched Diane, many curious facts came to light. The caps in earlier specimens of Diane are completely different from specimens published later, suggesting that the face was redesigned at some point, perhaps in the mid-1960s. So we are left with two different sets of caps. The original had very elaborate, swirly strokes, very characteristic of Excoffon¹s gestural designs for posters and logos. Later on, these appear to have been replaced by a set of simpler, more traditional script caps. The original caps are criticized in one source Mark found (Practical Handbook on Display Typefaces, 1959) as being "exquisite" but "not highly legible". Perhaps this is what led to the simpler caps being introduced. Nevertheless, FontHaus's release includes not only both sets of caps, but a range of alternates and a number of new characters not originally available such as the Euro, and a magnificent alternate Ampersand to name a few.

Aure Wye wraps a carefree dispassion with the dignity of tradition. The precise engraving and organic finials of these decorative serif forms engage the reader with a subtext of elegance. Wye brings an unpretentious grace to titles and drop-caps and provides dignity to astrological expressions and chartwheels. In Regular, Wye presents a formal presence; in Italic, Wye offers a more romantic feel. Its small-caps add a stately variety to Wye's typographic textures. Wye is an original design developed by Aurora Isaac. After more than a decade in development, 2018 marks the first release of the CJ and KB glyphsets, now available in regular and italic. The CJ glyphset is a full text font supporting a variety of European languages. A matching set of small-caps complements the extended lowercase and uppercase glyphsets. Supporting glyphs include standard ligatures, four variations of the ampersand, and check-mark and happy-face with their companions x-mark and grumpy-face. Numbers are available in lining, oldstyle, and small versions, with numerators and denominators for forming fractions. Companion glyphs include Roman numerals, specialized glyphs for indicating ordinals, and a variety of mathematical symbols and operators. The CJ glyphset also includes an extended set of glyphs for typesetting Western Astrology. These glyphs are also available separately in the KB glyphset: a symbol font re-coded to allow easy keyboard access for the most commonly used glyphs. Aure Wye will stand up as a text font, but for extended text, try pairing Wye with its close cousin, Aure Declare. Used in titles and drop-caps, Wye will provide a striking elegance that will blend well with the serifed forms of Declare. Give Aure Wye a trial run! You may discover a permanent place for this font family in your typographic palette. AureFontDesign.com