I've always admired the work of Rudolph Koch. Culpepper is what I think Neuland would have looked like if it had been developed with lowercase, small caps and a range of weights. I started work on this series in the late 80’s and, like so many of my ideas, it was shelved when life drew me in another direction. Culpepper is the name of one of the islands in the Galapagos chain.

Inspired by designs of the early Renaissance, Jenriv brings out a sedate atmosphere and generous inner spaces. Starting with the idea of mixing straightforward strokes and curves, it results in kind masculine figures, but calm and humble. It reminds some archaic air but a simplified one. Jenriv embraces text flows, multiple languages, and various styles with standard OpenType features. It is well adapted to various applications, from medium body text to large headlines, or logotypes.

Routemaster is a hand-drawn condensed title font by the graphic designer Daniel Thomas. Found under the stairs, hand painted on a dusty rolled up bus route canvas. Re-created and refined with additional glyphs, Routemaster is old, bold and unique. A characterful font. Pleasant for posters, lovely for a logo, brilliant for branding, tasteful for t-shirts, playful for packaging and becoming for book cover design. Enjoy your design journey with Routemaster

Qafidut Groovy is a psychedelic-inspired retro typeface with a bold and playful character. It’s ideal for branding, product packaging, or even just to add a little flair to your editorial work. This elegant typography has a simple and contemporary look but with a touch of beautiful simplicity to give a modern feel to every curve of the letter. what are you waiting for start using this font to create your own special project now!

Snow Cap from Bitstream is a wintry display face with snow effects dropped onto Jennifer Maestre’s Mister Earl. Released in 1995, the snow was artfully placed onto each character by Bitstream designer Richard Stetler.

The namesake for this type design was the dust jacket for the 1926 book “Revelry”. A classic Art Deco thick-and-thin design, Revelry Deco JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Letter Gothic was designed for IBM between 1956 and 1962 for use on the Selectric typewriter. Letter Gothic is a monospaced, sans serif face that can be useful for technical documentation and tabular work.

Family Deco JNL was inspired by the bold Art Deco hand lettering of the movie credits for the 1936 Laurel and Hardy comedy “Our Relations”, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Letter Gothic was designed for IBM between 1956 and 1962 for use on the Selectric typewriter. Letter Gothic is a monospaced, sans serif face that can be useful for technical documentation and tabular work.

I generally refer to our typefaces as ‘graphic’ rather than typographic. By that I mean their starting points are usually ways of constructing shapes and systems of shapes. As with other Alias typefaces, Sabre has stone and wood cut letterforms as a starting point. What is interesting about lettercutting is the connection between shape and material. These beautifully crafted letterforms have a particular sharpness which reflects, of course, how they were made. The idea of constructing letters from a kit of parts we first explored in early fonts Elephant and Factory. These are different in that they were very much grid-based, with a geometric structure. For Sabre I also had Fred Smeijers’ stencil construction drawings in mind. These show how a set of components can be the basis for a crafted, elegant typeface. Sabre is quite a loose interpretation of this idea. Sabre’s graphic shape means it works well at large sizes, with a dramatic, angular impact. Its aim is to be typographic enough to function for blocks of small-size text too.

In the early 1980s, at the start of my career, I had the opportunity to work in a print shop with classic lead setting. In those days I would study issues of U&lc magazine from ITC. What really caught my attention were scripts in the Spencerian style. I’ve been fascinated by this American penmanship tradition ever since. A few years ago I developed a font. Boris Bencic used it when he was redesigning L’Officiel magazine in Paris. I took these initial forms and developed them into the font Mommie when I started my own foundry. Although I usually design text typefaces, working on Mommie taught me how complex it can be to create a script headline font. The biggest challenge in this process has been to keep it alive and fresh. The Regular weight is only made for very big headlines. The thin lines with the bold drops are very elegant. For smaller sizes use the Medium and Small weight. It won the TDC 2008 award and was Judges Choice of Christian Schwartz.

Linotype Mega is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the entries of the Linotype-sponsored International Digital Type Design Contests of 1994 and 1997. The fun schrift of German designer Till F. Teenck is available in three weights whose names are word plays in themselves. Mega in (which we hope the font will be) contains relatively light, somewhat irregularly-drawn characters which look as though they were printed by hand and the characters are set rather far apart from each other. This weight is good for short and middle length texts in point sizes of 10 and larger. Mega normal is anything but. The characters are the outline forms of Mega in and their larger width reduces the distance between them. This weight is generally a headline font. Mega out is a very heavy weight and is the filled-in version of Mega normal. The characters flow into each other and look almost like silhouettes. The reduced legibility makes this font suitable exclusively for headlines in larger point sizes.

The design of Futura seems to be timeless. This typeface family which had been developed in 1926 by Paul Renner for the Bauer Type Foundry in the style of constructivism and as part of the Bauhaus movement, experienced, however, in the course of the past 90 years, repeated time-appropriate revivals which guaranteed its on-going popularity. The version of the Futura EF Pro contains the original character constructions which Dennis Megaw described as the “first designs of Futura” in 1938 in “20th century sans serif types, Typography no. 7” (See: Dr. Christopher Burke: Paul Renner, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1998). What makes it exceptional is the extension into three weights: “Text”, “Headline” and “Index” which came about as part of a degree dissertation at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg. In this context, the accompanying documentation “Die Kritik der reinen Futura” (“The Critique of the Pure Futura”) by Katharina Strauer was published by the Materialverlag, Hamburg, in 2003. Some copies are still available at Elsner+Flake.

The design of Futura seems to be timeless. This typeface family which had been developed in 1926 by Paul Renner for the Bauer Type Foundry in the style of constructivism and as part of the Bauhaus movement, experienced, however, in the course of the past 90 years, repeated time-appropriate revivals which guaranteed its on-going popularity. The version of the Futura EF Pro contains the original character constructions which Dennis Megaw described as the “first designs of Futura” in 1938 in “20th century sans serif types, Typography no. 7” (See: Dr. Christopher Burke: Paul Renner, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1998). What makes it exceptional is the extension into three weights: “Text”, “Headline” and “Index” which came about as part of a degree dissertation at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg. In this context, the accompanying documentation “Die Kritik der reinen Futura” (“The Critique of the Pure Futura”) by Katharina Strauer was published by the Materialverlag, Hamburg, in 2003. Some copies are still available at Elsner+Flake.

Futura is a classic geometric sans serif, one of the crucial typefaces of the 20th century. It remains relevant today and is widely used in logos, headings, web and print. Futura was designed by Paul Renner for Bauersche Gießerei (Bauer) in 1927. The typeface is based on simple geometric forms and is close in the aesthetics to 1920s-30s constructivism and the Bauhaus. Futura PT is the most complete Cyrillic version of Futura. It’s a type system of 25 styles: 16 regular and 9 narrow, from Thin to Extrabold. Futura PT has linear and old style figures, subscripts and fractions. The typeface supports more than 100 languages: Western and Central European Latin and the Cyrillic-extended. The Cyrillic version of Futura was designed by Vladimir Yefimov in 1991–1995. He partially redesigned the typeface in 2007, making it a wholesome consistent system, and Isabella Chaeva added new styles. The typeface was released under the name Futura PT. Isabella Chaeva returned to work on Futura in 2022. The typeface has three new styles, old style figures and extended Cyrillic support.

Ten years or so after his unique treatment of Garalde design with Trump Mediaeval, Georg Trump took on the transitional genre with Mauritius, which was to be his last typeface. He started working on it in 1965. The Stuttgart-based Weber foundry published a pamphlet previewing it under the name Barock-Antiqua in 1967, then announced the availability of the metal types (a roman, a bold and an italic) a year later. The global printing industry was already in third gear with cold type technology, so there weren't that many takers, and Weber closed its doors after more than 140 years in business. Subsequently, Trump’s swan song was unfairly overlooked by typography historians and practitioners. It never made it to film technology or scalable fonts. Thus, one of the most original text faces ever made, done by one of the most influential German type designers of the 20th century, was buried under decades of multiple technology shifts and fading records. The metal cuts of Mauritius seem to have been rushed in Weber’s desperation to stay afloat. So the only impressions left of the metal type, the sole records remaining of this design, show substantial problems. Some can be attributed to technological limitations, but some issues in colour, precision and fitting are also quite apparent, particularly in Mauritius Kursiv, the italic metal cut. This digital version is the result of obsessing over a great designer’s final type design effort, and trying to understand the reasons behind its vanishing from typography’s collective mind. While that understanding remains for the most part elusive, the creative and technical work done on these fonts produced very concrete results. All the apparent issues in the metal types were resolved, the design was expanded into a larger family of three weights and two widths, and plenty of 21st century bells and whistles were added. For the full background story, design analysis, details, features, specimens and print tests, consult the PDF available in the Gallery section of this page.

Claude Garamond (ca. 1480-1561) cut types for the Parisian scholar-printer Robert Estienne in the first part of the sixteenth century, basing his romans on the types cut by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1495. Garamond refined his romans in later versions, adding his own concepts as he developed his skills as a punchcutter. After his death in 1561, the Garamond punches made their way to the printing office of Christoph Plantin in Antwerp, where they were used by Plantin for many decades, and still exist in the Plantin-Moretus museum. Other Garamond punches went to the Frankfurt foundry of Egenolff-Berner, who issued a specimen in 1592 that became an important source of information about the Garamond types for later scholars and designers. In 1621, sixty years after Garamond's death, the French printer Jean Jannon (1580-1635) issued a specimen of typefaces that had some characteristics similar to the Garamond designs, though his letters were more asymmetrical and irregular in slope and axis. Jannon's types disappeared from use for about two hundred years, but were re-discovered in the French national printing office in 1825, when they were wrongly attributed to Claude Garamond. Their true origin was not to be revealed until the 1927 research of Beatrice Warde. In the early 1900s, Jannon's types were used to print a history of printing in France, which brought new attention to French typography and the Garamond" types. This sparked the beginning of modern revivals; some based on the mistaken model from Jannon's types, and others on the original Garamond types. Italics for Garamond fonts have sometimes been based on those cut by Robert Granjon (1513-1589), who worked for Plantin and whose types are also on the Egenolff-Berner specimen. Linotype has several versions of the Garamond typefaces. Though they vary in design and model of origin, they are all considered to be distinctive representations of French Renaissance style; easily recognizable by their elegance and readability. ITC Garamond? was designed in 1977 by Tony Stan. Loosely based on the forms of the original sixteenth-century Garamond, this version has a taller x-height and tighter letterspacing. These modern characteristics make it very suitable for advertising or packaging, and it also works well for manuals and handbooks. Legible and versatile, ITC Garamond? has eight regular weights from light to ultra, plus eight condensed weights. Ed Benguiat designed the four stylish handtooled weights in 1992." In 1993 Ed Benguiat has designed Handtooled versions.

PL Modern Heavy Condensed is based on a design by R.H. Middleton (1936). It has Bodoni-style letterforms, typical of Modern Serif faces. Use the PL Modern Heavy Condensed font for headlines in narrow settings.

A modern digital typeface inspired by the 1976 sci-fi film Logan's Run . The grid structure is re-worked from the out-of-use typeface OptiStabile Xtra Light with various new changes, refinements and additions.

The BD LoFi typeface was originally designed on an Amiga 1200 with TypeSmith in 1997. In 2023 BD LoFi received an update with a wider language support and a variable version with a bolder look.

The free form hand lettering comprising the titles and credits for the 1966 romantic comedy “The Glass Bottom Boat” were the model for Sightseeing Boat JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.