Sheet music for the song “The Little Thing You Used to Do” (from the 1935 motion picture “Go into your Dance” starring Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler) had its title set in what closely resembled Bank Gothic Condensed. [Bank Gothic was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders circa 1930.] This reinterpreted version is now known as Stenographer JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

One of the original Clarendon types, an English design, here derived from a specimen taken from an American foundry, no identifying marks. With a tall x-height, wide version, unlike more traditional Clarendons, not a square serif but bracketed. Unique to this Clarendon are the rounded openings at the points where the horizontal and vertical stems meet in the capital B, D, P and R, not common in other Clarendons.

In 1903, the typeface family Alternate Gothic was developed for ATF (American Type Foundry) by Morris Fuller Benton. It was Benton’s intent to solve many diverse layout problems with the development of a narrow Sans with different width values. The Alternate Gothic enjoys great popularity to this day. Therefore, Elsner+Flake re-worked the typeface family, added all European fixed accents and complemented it with an Antique version.

Victory Type is proud to present the release of another classic American typeface. Originally a wood-type, Barnum evokes circus wagons and wanted posters from the wild west. Rugged, rustic, old-fashioned and full of character, Barnum is a charming blast from the past and great for headlines and signage. This chunky slab-serif alphabet was digitized and expanded to include full punctuation and European characters by Noah Rothschild.

Originally designed for American Type Founders, Goudy drew inspiration from the classical old style faces for Goudy Old Style. Round characters have a strong diagonal stress, ascenders are fairly long but descenders are very short. Goudy bold was introduced in 1920; this was designed by Morris Fuller Benton. This typeface has been particularly popular in America where it is extensively used in advertising, book jackets, for labels and packaging.

Fitzronald is a body text typeface with a strong personality combined with a good legibility in small sizes. It is an excellent book typeface, but it can be used in e.g. advertising and packaging as well. Due to its good legibility at low resolution, it is a superb website and e-book typeface. Fitzronald is based on Ronaldson, an American typeface originally cut by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in 1884.

In 1903, the typeface family Alternate Gothic was developed for ATF (American Type Foundry) by Morris Fuller Benton. It was Benton’s intent to solve many diverse layout problems with the development of a narrow Sans with different width values. The Alternate Gothic enjoys great popularity to this day. Therefore, Elsner+Flake re-worked the typeface family, added all European fixed accents and complemented it with an Antique version.

Eden Light, originally designed by the American type designer Robert H. Middleton in 1934, was commissioned by Publish magazine for a redesign in 1990. When I found a specimen of Eden Bold a couple years later, I decided to digitize it also. Subsequently, I created a Medium weight. Very squared and compact with thin slab serifs, Eden includes support of all European languages that use the Latin alphabet.

Finura was inspired by American lettering from the 60s, specially the Stunt Roman for ruling pen and compass presented in the Speedball Textbook for Pen & Brush Lettering by Ross F. George, but also by looking carefully to University Roman characteristics. Finura is an experience on very thin poster typefaces and the possibilities to design extreme delicate typefaces, with plenty details, that sheer simplicity and readability to the classic forms.

The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati houses an amazing collection of vintage signage from all kinds of sources and covering many eras of retail advertising. Someone visiting the museum posted online an image of one particular piece of glass with hand lettering saying “gold leaf” in a bold Art Deco stencil style. Etched Stencil JNL was inspired by that image and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

This swoopy, loopy script was inspired by an “American roundhand” presented by John M. Bergling in his Art Alphabets and Lettering, first published in 1914. Bergling’s unique talent crafted uppercase letters which manage, at the same time, to be both elegant and ostentatious. The PC Postscript, Truetype and Opentype versions contain the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

The font family "DEADman" is mostly inspired by the weird style of the British illustrator Ralph Steadman. He had a long partnership with the American journalist Hunter S. Thompson, drawing pictures for several of his articles and books e.g. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Like Steadman's artwork all the letters are painted with ink. The best ones were selected out of hundreds of variations to get the whole character set complete and look uniform. By combining the regular weight with one (or both) of the additional weights "Blotting" and "Squirting" you can achieve a more freaky and psychadelic look.

The type design for Impecunious JNL comes from the 1939 sheet music for "You Don't Know How Much You Can Suffer (Until You Fall in Love)". The name comes from another piece of sheet music, 1899's "Impecunious Davis" [a piece of late 19th century tripe demeaning Black Americans]. However, the word "impecunious" was intriguing. According to the website Merriam-Webster.com, the simple definition of impecunious means "having little or no money". Since we've all been in that spot at one time or another, it became a perfect font name. Impecunious JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Medina Gothic is a three-weight sans serif inspired by Latin American moderne. It was designed in response to the 2002, Altos de Chavon design conference in The Dominican Republic, which celebrated utilitarian driven gestures in graphic design. "There’s a rigor to Medina Gothic that takes care of all sorts of tenets of a hard-working, highly legible, objective font. But at the same time, it’s human. All the curved terminals and open counter forms make for a sort of kindness. For all the discipline, it doesn’t sacrifice its friendliness." – William Morrisey, Professor of Typography, Parsons The New School for Design.

Tuscaloosa is a hybrid script that includes Tuscan (bifurcated) serif treatments. The design of Tuscaloosa began as a set of organically-formed initials, the Tuscan serifs being reminiscent of shoots and leaves bursting forth. Tuscaloosa also derives inspiration from the late Victorian era, when the development of newspaper and poster advertising led to extremes of weight in the main strokes. The font is intended to convey an aura of excitement and fun that characterized those times! The name 'Tuscaloosa' was chosen because of the appropriate combination of 'Tuscan' and 'looseness,' and because of its essentially American character.

Binny Old Style is based on type designs originally cut in Scotland about 1863. Binny Old Style shows the influence of the types cut by William Caslon but was an attempt to make a modernized version by eliminating some of Caslon's more archaic features. It was cut by some American foundries at the end of the nineteenth century and by Lanston Monotype for mechanical composition, in 1908. Binny Old Style was named after Archibald Binny, a Scotsman who established a type foundry in Philadelphia in 1796. The Binny Old Style font is ideal for small point size settings in newspaper advertisements, catalogues etc.

Mocombo JNL is a slightly modified version of one of the numerous alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times Magazine during the period of the 1930s through the 1950s. Tod Swormstedt of ST Media—who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio—supplied Jeff Levine a wealth of source material from which this font is derived. The angular style of this typeface was originally referred to as “German Poster Lettering” by Becker, but it can represent many styles from 1940s night clubs to African safaris and just about anything in-between.

RF Marshall was inspired by an 1883 tombstone, tucked away in a pioneer cemetery. The 4-sided marker is sparsely adorned with homespun carvings of a handprint, two tulip poplar leaves, and these words: "RF Marshall died 1883 Aged 72 years." The font faithfully reproduces the stone's hand-carved lettering and artwork, as well as artwork from other 18th and 19th century American headstones. It was drawn with calligraphy nibs dipped in walnut ink and delights in a range of end uses including period films, rustic decor, Halloween decorations, historical logos and branding, and on the pages of children's books.

“PGF Dinos” is a low contrast round typeface that resembles handmade American ‘Sign Painting’ in such the upper portion of the characters is bigger than the lower one, what gives the font a more playful and friendly personality. Another remarkable feature is its hooked terminals in characters such as C, G or S, heightening the differences between similar characters. “PGF Dinos” Family is composed of 10 different weights ranging from Hairline to Extra Black plus Italics and a full set of Dingbats. Early version was originallly called as “Globa” and was developed under the supervision of the Latinotype Team. Designer: Pedro González.

Xaver Nature is inspired by nature. Thus, it is characterized by curves and dynamic thickness of the stroke. At the same time, all letters are anchored on the baseline, which makes the font look calm despite its organic appearance. The Schrit contains two weights: a basic weight that guarantees great legibility even in small sizes. A decorative cut that integrates plants into the typeface as decorative elements. This is particularly suitable for headlines and titles. Furthermore, it offers language support for the entire European region, the North American region, as well as for South America and Oceania.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the sound of 1990s music, personal computers, and new font creation software. For years, Alexander Branczyk and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. The typeface F2F OCRAlexczyk is one of the Face2Face fonts in Linotype's Take Type Library. It is based on the popular computer font OCR A, which was developed by the American National Standards Institute in 1966 as a system of letters that both humans and machines could easily read. Alexander Branczyk made a more 1990s/techno version, which later became this font.

Compendium is a sequel to my Burgues font from 2007. Actually it is more like a prequel to Burgues. Before Louis Madarasz awed the American Southeast with his disciplined corners and wild hairlines, Platt Rogers Spencer, up in Ohio, had laid down a style all his own, a style that would eventually become the groundwork for the veering calligraphic method that was later defined and developed by Madarasz. After I wrote the above paragraph, I was so surprised by it, particularly by the first two sentences, that I stopped and had to think about it for a week. Why a sequel/prequel? Am I subconsciously joining the ranks of typeface-as-brand designers? Are the tools I build finally taking control of me? Am I having to resort to “milking it” now? Not exactly. Even though the current trend of extending older popular typefaces can play tricks with a type designer’s mind, and maybe even send him into strange directions of planning, my purpose is not the extension of something popular. My purpose is presenting a more comprehensive picture as I keep coming to terms with my obsession with 19th century American penmanship. Those who already know my work probably have an idea about how obsessive I can be about presenting a complete and detailed image of the past through today’s eyes. So it is not hard to understand my need to expand on the Burgues concept in order to reach a fuller picture of how American calligraphy evolved in the 19th century. Burgues was really all about Madarasz, so much so that it bypasses the genius of those who came before him. Compendium seeks to put Madarasz’s work in a better chronological perspective, to show the rounds that led to the sharps, so to speak. And it is nearly criminal to ignore Spencer’s work, simply because it had a much wider influence on the scope of calligraphy in general. While Madarasz’s work managed to survive only through a handful of his students, Spencer’s work was disseminated throughout America by his children after he died in 1867. The Spencer sons were taught by their father and were great calligraphers themselves. They would pass the elegant Spencerian method on to thousands of American penmen and sign painters. Though Compendium has a naturally more normalized, Spencerian flow, its elegance, expressiveness, movement and precision are no less adventurous than Burgues. Nearing 700 glyphs, its character set contains plenty of variation in each letter, and many ornaments for letter beginnings, endings, and some that can even serve to envelope entire words with swashy calligraphic wonder. Those who love to explore typefaces in detail will be rewarded, thanks to OpenType. I am so in love with the technology now that it’s becoming harder for me to let go of a typeface and call it finished. You probably have noticed by now that my fascination with old calligraphy has not excluded my being influenced by modern design trends. This booklet is an example of this fusion of influences. I am living 150 years after the Spencers, so different contextualization and usage perspectives are inevitable. Here the photography of Gonzalo Aguilar join the digital branchings of Compendium to form visuals that dance and wave like the arms of humanity have been doing since time eternal. I hope you like Compendium and find it useful. I'm all Spencered out for now, but at one point, for history’s sake, I will make this a trilogy. When the hairline-and-swash bug visits me again, you will be the first to know. The PDF specimen was designed with the wonderful photography of Gonzalo Aguilar from Mexico. Please download it here http://new.myfonts.com/artwork?id=47049&subdir=original

Dog Days is an American hand lettering style brush script family. Dog Days is swift, strong and full of bursting energy. Due to its clean features it’s legible even in small sizes. Dog Days is great for any display use -from poster to packaging and logo to t-shirt. Dog Days is also great for lettering works. Dog Days Brush boasts with more than 700 glyphs and plenty of OpenType features: Keep Standard Ligatures on - it adds variety in hand lettering style and keeps the flow steady. If you need more action try turning on Swash, Stylistic or Titling Alternates in any OpenType savvy software. Dog Days Brush is also equipped with Old Style Numerals if you need your numbers to fit more into text. Dog Days Brush uppercase letters are designed to work as initials so if you need to write all caps you might want to use Dog Days Caps or Dog Days Small Caps. Dog Days Caps can also be used as uppercase letters for the script. Dog Days Extras is a set of badges, swashes and swirls designed to play with the font. Dog Days is inspired by a hand lettering sample in a vintage American swimsuit advertisement.

Arcadian was first produced in wood type around 1870 by William H. Page & Company. It is a semi-ornamented face based on a French Clarendon, with dots added to the median and the tops and bottoms of the letters. It has a distinctly “Old West” feel, and was likely used to add a little pizzazz to advertising and broadsides of the time.

Small Heath - Slab Serif Font. Small Heath is a slab serif inspired by vintage american poster but made flexible enough for everyday use. Small Heath is unique font because the difference "slab" of each character. This serif is very beauty, so it makes Small Heath look amazing great. Small Heath best uses for title, invitation, heading, cover, poster, logos, quotes, product packaging, merchandise, social media & greeting cards and many more The alternative characters were divided into several Open Type features such as Swash, Stylistic Sets, Stylistic Alternates, Contextual Alternates, and Ligature. The Open Type features can be accessed by using Open Type savvy programs such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop Corel Draw X version, And Microsoft Word. This font is also support multi language.

ITC Coventry is the work of American designer Brian Sooy. ITC Coventry is what type would look like if you left a gothic font out in the rain. IF you look close, you'll see the roots of a handsome sans serif font buried under a layer of grime and rust, basically." The low-budget student flyers that Sooy saw in the Coventry section of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, inspired him to design this font and the result is a typeface which looks as though it has been faxed or photocopied many times. "While it looks very irregular in text, it's very carefully spaced to give that effect," says Sooy. ITC Coventry was designed to work just as well in text as in headlines or even on billboards."

Canterbury Old Style Pro is a two-weight serif font family with a small x-height. In 1920, Morris F. Benton designed the original weight for American Type Founders (ATF). Raymond Vatter and Steve Jackaman produced the digital version in 1992 and added a new “Bold” weight, and a full set of swash capitals were designed and released in 2003. Jackaman redrew and remastered the family in 2017, engineering the complete family into OpenType Pro format. Our OpenType fonts have extended character sets that support Western, Central, and Eastern European languages. Canterbury OS Pro has a whimsical, old-time feel, and handsomely distinguishes itself at all sizes. Canterbury Sans, its sans serif sister font, complements the family with its flowing forms.

Silian Rail is a high quality serif typeface. A professional uppercase font, this intellectual font has a distinct personality while being strict and controlled. Drawn and created by Mans Greback in 2022, the Silian Rail family consists in 16 high-quality styles, complimenting each other. Among them, Light, Regular, Bold, Black, Italic, Sharp and several combinations. 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 American to South-East Asian. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

Inspired by the large American wood type of the Wild West, Richard Yeend created Italienne Std in 2002. Italienne Std is both very condensed and very decorative. It sports heavy, band like serifs, reminiscent of other italienne-style fonts, like Westside. Italienne-style fonts rose in popularity during the early 19th Century, when designers were first beginning to experiment with extreme contrast within letterforms, and across lines of text. Interestingly enough, letterforms with similar designs were just as common during the 1970s as during the 1870s, so you may use Italienne Std for applications ranging from country music concerts to disco parties. Italienne Std is part of the Take Type 5 collection from Liinotype GmbH."

This script font was inspired from a lot of manuscripts, notes and drafts, written by the famous American poet Walt Whitman. It is a very elegant type, in spite of a few curious ligatures, often concerning the r or z small letters. Notice the very characteristic “th”. It is used as variously as web-site titles, posters and fliers design or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, menus, certificates, letters. This font, in spite of its small size, supports very strong enlargements as well as small sizes ( the original size was about 36 to 48 pts ). When printed, it remains perfectly legible and elegant from 9/11 pts even if using an ordinary inkjet printer.

Gibbs is a tough, sophisticated sans, inspired by the unique cast aluminum signs found on board the 1950s luxury liner SS United States and named for its designer, William Francis Gibbs. The design is appropriately transatlantic, somewhere in between industrial American vernacular lettering and English humanist styles. The result is both uniquely stylish and comfortably readable in both text and display sizes. Gibbs received a Type Directors Club award for excellence in 2015.

This willowy wonder is based on Morris Fuller Benton’s Stymie Obelisk, one in a series of typefaces he designed for American Type Founders in the 1930s. An obvious choice when real estate is at a premium, its classic forms will add just the right amount of punch to any headline it graces. Both versions include complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1524 character sets, with localization for Moldovan, Romanian and Turkish.

P22 Blox is a modular system of shapes that can build letterforms and abstract patterns. Created as a working prototype for the letterpress P22 Blox project from P22 Analog and Starshaped Press, this system of shapes presents a unique approach to designing letterforms with a limited set of variables. Based on the American Type Founders 1944 modular metal type ornament system... you can have hours of fun building letters, patterns and more.

Designed at ParaType in 1990 by Elvira Slysh. Based on Brush Script of American Type Founders, 1972, by Robert E. Smith. À popular and widely used script face. Designed to give the impression of letters written with a brush with coherent lowercase, giving a fairly black overall color. Ideal for display work and wherever an informal, handwritten style is required. For use in posters, newspapers and magazines, advertisements, signs and many other informal applications.

Miss Demeanor has a tendency to create her own rules due to her free-spirited nature. She conforms to every day typographic expectations but she wouldn’t like you to think so. She has unusual yet casual and eye catching shapes and makes the best of any situation. I hope you enjoy her pretty style! My inspiration for Miss Demeanor came from a specimen sheet of an american type style from the early 1930’s.

Hauser Script is a freely drawn brush script typeface, which was designed in 1936 by George Hauser for Ludlow. Hauser took advantage of the slanting matrices of the Ludlow machine to create what is possibly the most informal of American brush scripts. Steve Jackaman of International TypeFounders, Inc. (ITF) digitally engineered the typeface in 1998. Hauser Script has a graceful, calligraphic look that brings class to any project at display and subhead sizes.

Born from the intersection of the geometric and grotesque typefaces. Aribau Grotesk combines low contrast and generous width proportions with typical traits of american gothics from the early 20th century, like the counters aperture and a double story ‘g’. Driven by the process, some details that come from the geometric style arose, like the clean-shaped figures and the circular dots that convey a more affable and contemporary look. Aribau Grotesk PDF.

A 1930s WPA (Works Progress Administration) poster promoting national parks depicts Native Americans overlooking the land with the tag line "his hunting ground of yesterday". The hand lettering of that text is reminiscent of Futura Black and similar Art Deco stencil-influenced type designs, but is rendered in an oblique lower case with no capitals. Re-drawn as Sandwich Shop JNL, the typeface is now available in both regular (vertical) and oblique versions.

Ganelon is a new, original design by Dave Nalle in the style of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s. It draws on some of the design characteristics of lettering by artists from English and American branches of the movement, with additional original features. Ganelon Lower Case features the main upper case character set of Ganelon, but instead of small caps it has a full set of lower case letters.

Belmont JNL is named for an avenue in the Bronx, New York famous for once being the location of the Belmont Estate, which was the home of the Lorrillard tobacco family. The Art-Deco-era hand lettering from some vintage sheet music is the basis for this type design. During the 1950s a quartet of teenaged Italian-American singers took the street's name for their vocal group, naming themselves Dion and the Belmonts.