P22 Graciosa is a five font family based upon designs for a metal type by Carlos Winkow (1882–1952), a German type designer who lived and worked in Spain in the early 20th Century. Graciosa is a sort of hybrid blackletter/text font, with simplified blackletter caps and a serifed lowercase with subtle script flare. There is a Regular, Black, an open version called White, and an engraved version called Gris. The version called Multi serves as a fill font to allow for multi-colored layering options. A revival of these designs was initiated by Matthias Beck in 2015. The character set was expanded for use in 21 languages (OpenType Standard). The digitization and reintroduction of these old fonts—created in Spain and practically forgotten—makes them regain a new life. This project was subsidized by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.

Paquita was my first foray into the turbulent world of typography. Created in full in about three hours drawing directly into the program, technically speaking was a disaster. Once achieved the highest levels of misery I decided to get serious and after a lot of studies and tweaks, is now in its Pro version on sale in this prestigious store.

The handmade title on the cover for the 1939 edition of “A Wand’ring Minstrel” [from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado”] was rendered with a round nib lettering pen in an Art Deco style. This type design is now available as Cover Letter JNL in both regular and oblique versions. However, the font’s name is a bit of a pun, as it has nothing to do with cover letters, but rather the lettering found on the cover of the sheet music.

Morris Fuller Benton's Hobo [designed in 1910] is one of a number of fonts which have been so over-used that many designers shy away from it altogether. However, Jeff Levine had often wondered what the design might look like it given a serif treatment. The result is Rail Bum JNL, named for the hobos and transients who hitched along on freight cars to ride the rails across the country during the years when trains were the mainstay of American transportation.

A few scant examples of some condensed Roman style water-applied decals inspired Sign Letters JNL. The decals were once part of the gold and black "Signmaker" letters and numbers once manufactured by the Duro Decal Company of Chicago and were sold through hardware and variety stores across the country. The condensed letters (which were eight inches in height) did not sell as well as Duro's mainstay sizes of 1/2 inch to 3-1/2 inches and were discontinued long before the rest of the line was supplanted by self-adhesive lettering.

One good pun is worth a simple description… Nondescript JNL… 'Non' - not. 'de' - of, in Spanish. script - a cursive (handwritten) letter form. So… while nondescript generally means lacking any defining description, in this case it also means "not of a script"… which is precisely what a typeface such as this one is!