A 1934 advertisement for the Roney Plaza Hotel at 23rd Street and Collins Avenue on Miami Beach yielded the inspiration for Tropical Tourist JNL. While this wonderful example of Art Deco lettering survived, sadly the original Roney was torn down around 1969 and replaced with a modern apartment house/condos bearing the same name.

One day my kids asked me: ‘would you rather be healthy and poor or super rich and sick?’ Without a doubt I answered: ‘healthy and poor’. Having money is nice, but it is not what life is about. At least, that is what I believe. Radical Fortune is a font I made after a period in my life that could have ended with a really nice sum of money in my hands - but which I didn’t take. I had to give up too much of myself and that just didn’t feel right. I made Radical Fortune to keep me from thinking too much - and, symbolically, I used a really old and cheap marker pen to draw out the glyphs!

A 1929 German travel poster had the caption “Wer schlafwagen reist spart zdeit und geld” (“Whoever travels in a sleeping car saves time and money”) hand lettered in an Art Deco sans serif style. This is now available as Foreign Tourist JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

The look of hand lettering often breaks up the monotony of the printed page. Rockaway JNL from Jeff Levine is a big, friendly sans serif that can give more of a human touch to your upcoming project without looking too informal.

The cover of vintage sheet music for "With Plenty of Money and You (The Gold Diggers' Lullaby)" from the Warner Brothers musical "Gold Diggers of 1937" had the movie title hand-lettered in a classic Art Deco style. Bold, brash and totally fun, this became the model for Golden Opportunity JNL.