The Charta family of fonts draws its inspiration from the letter styles used in early manuscripts and printed books. Charta is also remarkably versatile: it’s equally at home in a traditional or modern context and can be used for a wide range of applications from an automobile badge to a newspaper masthead and from a fashion label to a candy bar wrapper.

The chamfered block style of lettering has been a workhorse for years. From the early signage of the 1800s to military markings to the techno fonts of the 1980s and beyond, its clean and simple look gets the message across easily and boldly. Industrialist JNL and its oblique partner were modeled from the title on a piece of sheet music from the 1940s.

This exuberant face was suggested by a piece of French sheet music from the 1930s for the song Sur un Air de Shimmy, The name comes from an Australian song from the 1950s about a noncompliant boomerang. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

The Vtg Stencil fonts from astype are based on real world stencils from several countries. The Vtg Stencil Marsh design was derived from 1 inch stencils, cut by a Marsh R machine. Marsh produced stencil machines since 1922 and was one of the most important manufacturers for such marking machines. The design is part of the American industrial heritage. PDF Specimen

Here's a handy collection of 72 type adornments gleaned from American Type Foundry catalogs from 1913 to 1934, featuring little treasures from some of the early twentieth century's most respected designers, including Will Bradley, Frederic Goudy and George Trenholm. Among the goodies are fleurons, pilcrows, guidons, bishops fingers, mortised initial frames and several other useful elements to dress up your documents.

Vicentina has been created starting from gothic cursive calligraphy, widely used in Italy during XIV century. The ductus of Vicentina has been derived from the documents redacted by Master Domenico Dominici from Vicenza, while most of the inspiration comes from books preserved in the archives of Orvieto Cathedral (Archivi dell'Opera del Duomo di Orvieto). As a result, Vicentina takes form with an elegant, but fast and simplified ductus respect to gothic graphs, rich in ligatures and with over 400 OpenType glyphs, in perfect harmony with the rules of readability of a modern typeface.

Picaflor is a sans typeface family perfect for titles, it contains 6 weights from thin to Black in addition to Greek and cyrillic alphabet with many alternatives from ligatures and letters, enjoy it!

Fishhook is a letterbat font that makes letters from fishhooks and barbs. In the plain version the fishhooks look more realistic, but the bold version may be more satisfying from a typographical perspective.

A cardboard stencil toy for children from the late 1950's or early 1960's was the inspiration for Study Hall JNL, part of a series of stencil revival fonts from Jeff Levine.

Strong Stencil JNL derives its name from its visual appeal. Strong, rugged, all-purpose; this type design (modeled from a set of brass stencils) can take on the toughest type chores and deliver.

Czech Stencil JNL was modeled from examples of a 1930s-era typeface from Czechoslovokia called "Patrona Grotesk" as seen in the Steven Heller-Louise Fili book "Stencil Type" (published by Thames and Hudson).

a classic from american heritage

from american wood type heritage

Another handmade font from Bogstav.com

Guinevere Pro is a typeface designed by Icelandic art director Sigurdur Armannsson. It started in 2001 as simple hand-drawn sketches of a few letters built from modules, then became an experiment with four goals: - Construct an original alphabet from a specific set of predetermined modules. - See how certain letter forms built without said modules would behave within the totality of the module-constructed alphabet. - See if certain letters would actually enforce their own shapes to be drawn a certain way within the totality of the typeface. Likewise, see if the totality of the alphabet demands that individual letters be drawn in a specific way, and if so, how much room for variation would there be? - See how all of the above reacts/changes to implementing the alphabet across different weights. The experiment was finessed and re-worked over many years of technology changes, and Guinevere Pro is the final outcome, ten years later. The Guinevere Pro set is four cross-platform Open Type fonts, with built-in small caps, alternates, ligatures, and support for a wide range of Latin-based languages.

The award-winning Conrad was created by Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi. Its design was based on the fifteenth-century type by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, two German printers active in Rome at that time. They produced a unique, slightly unbalanced yet attractive type. Kobayashi says of his typeface, “I have designed a couple of typefaces inspired from the past, but this time the original print acted merely as a reference. The distinctive lowercase ‘a’ and some other letters were inspired by Sweynheym and Pannartz’s second roman type, but I revived the type in a more informal way. Here I used the historical type as a springboard. The resulting type looks different, taking on a rather temporary and lively look. I assume that the Conrad is the first revival of the Sweynheym and Pannartz type, though it does not closely resemble the original.” Conrad won first prize for the text typeface category in Linotype’s Third International Typeface Design Contest (2000) as well as the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club (2001).

A typeface of grace, power and exceptional versatility, the Slate collection is a truly beautiful design that achieves stellar levels of readability, both in print and on screen. Created by the award winning type designer Rod McDonald, this six-weight sans serif family is a rare example of sublime aesthetics meeting world-class functionality. The typeface’s legible letterforms embody an amalgam of the best traits of both humanistic and grotesque letterforms. “I didn’t want a face with an ‘engineered’ look, or with any noticeable design gimmicks or devices,” admits designer McDonald. “I wanted a pure design. I confess that I was ruthless with any character that wanted to stand out from the rest.” The Slate collection is available in six weights with complementary italics, with slight changes in structure from the light to the black weights. Its light weight is reminiscent of early American sans. Whether for use in display work or in longer-form settings, few typefaces possess the beauty and power of this design, leaving the Slate family an excellent addition to any designer’s typographic quiver.