The Scriptorium got its start in the early days of personal computers with a few font designs for the Commodore 64, and the very first font which we did back then in the early 1980s was a gothic calligraphy font. That style of fonts - the medieval, gothic and black letter genre - has always been the backbone of our collection, but with recent releases we've stayed away from them to introduce a bit more variety. Well, with our new Zauberer font the antique, medieval and gothic look is back with a vengeance. Zauberer isn't a true medieval calligraphy style. It's based on early printed type from Germany which combines calligraphic elements with decorative embellishments from the woodcut printing era. The result is decorative and antique looking and rather appealing. The name comes from the German word for a magician or illusionist.

Highbrow Cafetorium JNL is a very "minimalist" font in the sense that there's only the basic lower case characters and essential punctuation. The lettering is based on a neon-and-bulb wall sign for a long-closed cafeteria on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, Florida. The 'b', 'd', 'k' and 'l' have unusually high verticals.

An ad in the May 27, 1939 issue of "Motion Picture Herald" for the film "Young Mr. Lincoln" featured the film's title hand lettered in a squared, bold pen lettering with rounded terminals along with an incised 'engraving' line. This formed the basis for Political Trend JNL, which available in both regular and oblique versions.

After researching the type styles contemporary graphic designers have been using over the past few years, I noticed a consistent use of Copperplate Gothic, and its derivative designs, for various corporate advertising campaigns. That level of usage gave me the inspiration to design a display font possessing subtle characteristics of Copperplate Gothic, and various Latin Condensed designs. The font I ended up designing was semi-condensed, with more contrast between thicks and thins than in Copperplate. Baltra also has a subtle flair in its otherwise traditional lowercase, while possessing a larger than average lowercase x-height. Copperplate Gothic, on the other hand, has minimal contrast and uses small capitals for its lowercase. After examining extensive type specimens from wood type, metal type, phototype and digital type, I was not able to find a single design possessing a majority of Baltra's characteristics. Consequently, I consider Baltra to be a truly unique design, sharing with Copperplate Gothic only its flairs on stems, and having only subtle characteristics in common with traditional Latin designs.

In 1994, Apple® Computer, Inc., asked David Berlow for “a future gothic” to replace Chicago®, their system font. Now called Charcoal®, the design was released with Mac® OS 8 in 1996. Through operating system bundles it found its way into every form of design. Released from constraint, Berlow designed Truth FB, a radical series with a spectrum of seven weights. Like its forbear, Truth FB opens new design avenues; FB 2005

A disc jockey-only promotional sleeve for a 1964 [45 rpm] release of “Close to Me” and “Let Them Talk” by Dan Penn featured the song titles printed in a stencil typeface on the record sleeve. Closely resembling a stencil version of Franklin Gothic but with its own unique characteristics, this design has been reinterpreted as Turntable Stencil JNL and is available in both regular and oblique versions. For trivia buffs, Dan Penn is a singer-songwriter-record producer, often collaborating with Dewey Lindon “Spooner” Oldham; both closely associated with the late Rick Hall’s Fame recording studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In 1964, Hall started the Fame record label, and for a time it was distributed by Vee-Jay Records of Chicago, the first major Black-owned record label in the United States. Penn’s release was only the second for the new label; Fame 6402.

Jim Rimmer aptly described his Dokument family as a sans serif in the vein of News Gothic that takes nothing from News Gothic. Building on that internal analysis, Dokument Pro is the thoroughly reworked and expanded of the original main set released in 2005, with different widths still in the pipeline. This new version updates Jim’s work to six Pro weights and their italic counterparts, each of which takes advantage of OpenType stylistic sets to introduce different degrees of graduation from gothic to humanist. Dokument Pro is now a unique text sans family, with an adaptable personality suitable for the kind of edgy, uncompromising corporate and media typography that just tells it like it is, instead of having to resort to the common contemporary luring and baiting tactics. Dokument Pro’s range of weights, styles and features (over 775 glyphs per font, built-in small caps, alternates galore, and support for over 45 Latin languages) allows for multi-application versatility and clear, precise emotional delivery. This is the kind of straight-shooter sans that should be in every designer’s toolbelt. For more details on the fonts' features, text and display specimens and print tests, consult the Dokument Pro PDF availabe in the Gallery section of this page. 20% of Dokument Pro’s revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

A 1930s WPA (Works Projects Administration) poster advertising a play entitled “Abraham Lincoln, The Great Commoner” had the play’s name done in a hand-lettered Art Deco sans. This is the basis for Art Project JNL. According to Wikipedia, “the Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. In a much smaller but more famous project, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.”

Roswell was designed by Jim Parkinson, who acknowledges the 'spacey' ancestry of its name. Yes, Roswell, New Mexico. There was a big anniversary of 'the incident' in the news while I was designing in Roswell. "The incident" is of course the alleged UFO crash in Roswell. "I thought the name was acceptable as a serious font name, while, on another level, having a strangely humorous edge," says Parkinson. Roswell looks great in large sizes on a poster or in a magazine layout. It started out as "a variation on American gothic forms like Railroad Gothic", says the designer, but Roswell is an original design with eccentricities of its own."

The design of the Newspoint typeface is based on the tradition of the American sans serif faces of the last century. This form expression was greatly influenced by the News Gothic type which was created by Morris Fuller Benton in 1908, and has, once again, become very popular. When the development of sans serif types such as Futura and Kabel by Renner and Koch began in 1925, the design of American sans serif types receded somewhat into the background. In the 1950’s, however, they experienced a renaissance which continues to this day. Thanks to its clean design and the relatively large x-height, the Newspoint is well suited for informative texts in newspapers, magazines, and brochures. In packaging design, as well, the Newspoint can display its strength in small print. Newspoint was developed as a customer-specific variation of the News Gothic. In contrast to the News Gothic, however, the face appears to be softer and more appealing thanks to the changed interpunctions. If so desired, the alternative characters give the typeface expanded individuality and a richness of design options.

Philip Bouwsma’s offbeat mind, always working in mysterious ways, brings us one of the unlikeliest syntheses of historical influences in a perfectly fluid, organic, and highly expressive connected script. Tupelo takes its inspirational roots from the handwritings of two of the most influential men in world history: Elvis Presley and Abraham Lincoln. It took a little research and analysis on Bouwsma’s part to reveal that The King’s and Honest Abe’s methods of writing shared a common ancestor: a writing system they had both learned as youths during their early school years. While Tupelo’s lowercase maintains the slant, color, texture, and flourish of Elvis’s handwriting, its uppercase is the embodiment of Lincoln’s well-versed originality. This is the closest a typeface has ever come, in its timeliness and historic relevance, to making a statement about these modern days' fusion of politics and popular culture. Tupelo comes in two main fonts, plus a set of beginning lowercase, a set of ending lowercase, and plenty of alternates and extras. The non-Pro set consists of five fonts, while Tupelo Pro combines the lot in a single font of over 840 characters, which includes programming for push-button swash caps, stylistic alternates, oldstyle figures, beginning and ending letters. Elvis and Abe would be proud!

Handel Slab, designed by Ralph M. Unger, is a new offering which ideally enhances and extends the existing Handel Gothic family. Even so, Handel Slab can very well be used on its own. Obviously, Handel Slab is closely based on Handel Gothic, which was designed by Don Mandel in the mid 1960s and which has been popular and successful amongst users from day one. Even today, it is a futuristic sans serif, and it is used for a wide range of typographic tasks, for example in computer games. Handel Slab provides a perfect enhancement to Handel Gothic, and the combination of both families offers more flexibility to designers and typographers.

Trump Soft Pro is the softer, round-cornered version of Trump Gothic Pro, the popular condensed gothic seen on films, magazines, book covers and frashion brands all over the globe. Trump Soft offers a friendlier grade of the same economic functionality, clear modular aesthetic and extended character sets as Trump Gothic. The sharper Trump Grothic series is a reconception of ideas from Georg Trump’s seminal 1955 Signum typeface and its later reworking (Kamene) by Czech designer Stanislav Marso. Originally cobbled together for a variety of film projects in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Trump Gothic family was made available for the general public in 2005. Shortly thereafter, it became extremely popular. It continues to be used extensively today. In 2013, the typeface was redrawn, refitted, optimized and greatly expanded into a multiscript family of six fonts, each containing over 1020 glyphs and a wealth of OpenType features, including small caps, caps-to-small-caps, stylistic alternates, unicase/monocase alternates, fractions, ordinals, class-based kerning, and support for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek locales.

Introducing a new font - an old biker. It is a multilayer vintage typeface with 5 styles. The font contains stylistic alternatives for uppercase and lowercase letters. Numbers, punctuation and multilingual characters for each style. The font design is inspired by gothic, biker and rock culture.

FF Good is a straight-sided sans serif in the American Gothic tradition, designed by Warsaw-based Łukasz Dziedzic. Despite having something of an “old-fashioned” heritage, FF Good feels new. Many customers agree: the sturdy, legible forms of FF Good have been put to good use in the Polish-language magazine ‘Komputer Swiat,’ the German and Russian edition of the celebrity tabloid OK!, and the new corporate design for the Associated Press. Although initially released as a family of modest size, the typeface was fully overhauled in 2010, increasing it from nine styles to 30 styles, with an additional 30-style sibling for larger sizes, FF Good Headline. In 2014, the type system underwent additional expansion to become FontFont’s largest family ever with an incredible 196 total styles. This includes seven weights ranging from Light to Ultra, and an astonishing seven widths from Compressed to Extended for both FF Good and FF Good Headline, all with companion italics and small caps in both roman and italic. With its subtle weight and width graduation, it is the perfect companion for interface, editorial, and web designers. This allows the typographer to pick the style best suited to their layout. As a contemporary competitor to classic American Gothic style typefaces—like Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, or Trade Gothic—it was necessary that an expanded FF Good also offers customers both Text and Display versions. The base FF Good fonts are mastered for text use, while FF Good Headline aims for maximum compactness. Its low cap height together with trimmed ascenders and descenders give punch to headlines and larger-sized copy in publications such as newspapers, magazines, and blogs.