Jazz Gothic is a digitization and expansion of an early 1970s film type from Franklin Photolettering called Pinto Flare. This type became an instant titling classic with jazz and soul album designers; then it caught on wildly with film and television designers. Blue Note and Motown would not have been the same without this face. Jazz Gothic is a simple geometric idea, quite likely originally inspired by the heavier display weights of Futura. The resulting product is a versatile message-driver that stands quite strong and cherishes the limelight, yet shows a playful and artistic side within its curvy thick swashes and rebellious unicase forms. In the hands of a good designer, Jazz Gothic eliminates any doubt about the delivery of the message or the attractive purposeful way it is delivered. It is the kind of typeface that loves a design program's bells and whistles. Knock it out of dark or light backgrounds, shade it, mask-alize it, roughen it, stretch it, squeeze it, and the message will still stand larger than life. Jazz Gothic comes in two fonts, a main one with a full character set to accommodate the majority of Latin-based languages, and a second one that contains about 50 alternates and swashed forms. The OpenType version is a single font that has all the alternates and swashes at the disposal of the buttons of OT-savvy program palettes.

The characteristic ‘French face’ was originally made in 1899 under the supervision of Joseph Pinel. Thus, what was originally French 10 pt. Nº 2, got its present name. The Frenchman Joseph Pinel called himself a "typographical engineer", but was at the time employed as a type draughtsman at the Linotype Works in Altrincham. It appears that this and some other faces that he supervised, were, except for use on the Linotype, also meant for manufacturing matrices for the Dyotype. This composing machine was an invention of Pinel. The Dyotype was a rather complicated machine and consisted, like the Monotype, of two separate contraptions, a keyboard which produced a perforated paper ribbon and a casting machine which produced justified lines of movable type. Unlike the Monotype which has a square matrix carrier, the Dyotype had the matrices on a drum (in fact two drums, hence the name of the machine). A Pinel Diotype company was founded in Paris and a machine was built with the help of the printing press manufacturer Jules Derriey. As is often the case, a lack of sufficient capital prevented the commercializing of this ingenious composing machine. Coen Hofmann digitized the font from a batch of very incomplete, damaged and musty drawings, which he dug up in Altrincham. He redrew all characters, bringing up the hairstrokes somewhat in the process. The result is a roman and italic, while the roman font also includes Small Caps

Roller Poster is named after Alfred Roller. In 1902, Roller created a poster to advertise the 16th exhibit of Austrian Artists and Sculptures Association, representing the Vienna Secession movement. The exhibit was to take place in Vienna during January & February 1903. The location is not mentioned because everyone in Vienna knew it would be held at the exhibit hall in the Secession Building at Friedrichstraþe 12, a few blocks south of the Opernring, near the Naschmarkt. Designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich in 1897, the buiilding has been restored and stands today as one finest of the many fine examples of Art Nouveau architecture in Vienna (see vienna_secession_bldg.jpg). Because of its dome, it is called “the golden cabbage.” The poster itself is unique. The word “secession” is in one type style and takes up two-thirds of the elongated poster. At the bottom of the poster are the details in a different lettering style. It is this second style at the bottom that is the basis for the font Roller Poster. In keeping with our regular naming conventions, we were going to call it Roller Gezeichnete (hand-drawn), but the wonderful play on both words and the shape of the three S’s in secession was too compelling. In November 1965 there was an exhibit of Jugendstil and Expressionist art at the University of California. Alfred Roller’s Secession Poster was part of that exhibit. Wes Wilson was designing promotional material at Contact Printing in San Francisco. Among their clients was a rock promoter named Bill Graham, staging dance-concerts at Fillmore Auditorium. Wilson saw the catalog from the UC exhibit and Roller’s lettering. Wilson adapted Roller’s letter forms to his own fluid style. The result was the poster for the August 12-13, 1966 Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead concert at Fillmore put on by Graham (BG23-1). Wilson continued to use Roller’s letter forms on most of the posters he did for Graham through May 1967, when he stopped working for Graham. The posters were extremely successful and the lettering style along with Roller’s letter forms were picked up by other artists, including Bonnie MacLean, Clifford Charles Seeley, James Gardner, and others. The Secession poster and the Fillmore posters have inspired a number of fonts in addition to ours. Among them are JONAH BLACK (& WHITE) by Rececca Alaccari, LOVE SOLID by Leslie Carbarga and MOJO by Jim Parkinson. Each is different and yet each clearly shows its bloodlines. Our font differs in two ways: 1) the general differences in the interpretation of the letter forms and 2) the modification of the basic letter form to incorporate the diacriticals within the implied frame of the letter, after the manner of the original design by Roller. We borrowed Carbarga’s solution to the slashed O and used it, in a modified form, for other characters as well to accomplish the same purpose. We recommend that you buy ours and at least one of the other three. According to Alaccari, a version called URBAN was released by Franklin Lettering in the 70’s (and is shown on page 51 of The Solotype Catalog). For comparison of our font to original design, see image files roller_poster_2s.jpg of original poster and roller_poster_2sx.jpg showing reconstruction using our font for the lower portion (recontructed area indicated by blue bar). Please note the consistency of character width. In the lower case, 23 of the basic 26 letters are 1/2 EM Square wide. The ‘i’ is an eighth narrower, while the ‘m’& ‘w’ are one quarter wider. All the Upper Case letters are 1/8 EM wider than the lower case. This is to make it easier to fill a geometrical shape like a rectangle, allowing you to capture a little of the flavor of Wes Wilson’s Fillmore West poster using only a word processor. We have also included a number of shapes for use as spacers and endcaps. If you have a drawing program that allows you to edit an ‘envelope’ around the letters to distort their shape, you can really get creative. I used Corel Draw for the gallary images, but there are other programs that can accomplish the same thing. The image file “roller_poster_keys.jpg” shows the complete character set with the keystrokes required for each character (see “HiH_Font_readme.txt” for instruction on inserting the non-keyboard characters). The file “roller_poster_widths.jpg” shows the exact width of each character in EM units (based on 1000 units per EM square). You will notice that the font is set wide for readability. However, most programs will allow you to tighten up on the character spacing after the manner of Roller & Wilson. In MS Word, for example, go to the FORMAT menu > FONT > CHARACTER SPACING. Go to the second Drop-Down Menu, labeled ‘Spacing’ and select "condensed' and then set the amount that you want to condense ‘by’ (key on the little arrows); two points (2.0) is a godd place to start. Let your motto be EXPLORE & EXPERIMENT. Art Nouveau has always been one of my favorite movements in art -- I grew up in a home with a couple of Mucha prints hanging on the living room wall. Perhaps because of that and because I lived through the sixties, I have enjoyed researching and designing this font more than any other I have worked on. Let’s face it (pardon the pun), Roller Poster is a FUN font. You owe it to yourself to have fun using it.

Rian Hughes’ 15th collection of fonts, “112 Hours”, is entirely dedicated to numbers. Culled from a myriad of sources – clock faces, tickets, watches house numbers – it is an eclectic and wide-ranging set. Each font contains only numerals and related punctuation – no letters. A new book has been designed by Hughes to show the collection, and includes sample settings, complete character sets, source material and an introduction. This is available print-to-order on Blurb in paperback and hardback: http://www.blurb.com/b/5539073-112-hours-hardback http://www.blurb.com/b/5539045-112-hours-paperback From the introduction: The idea for this, the fifteenth Device Fonts collection, began when I came across an online auction site dedicated to antique clocks. I was mesmerized by the inventive and bizarre numerals on their faces. Shorn of the need to extend the internal logic of a typeface through the entire alphabet, the designers of these treasures were free to explore interesting forms and shapes that would otherwise be denied them. Given this horological starting point, I decided to produce 12 fonts, each featuring just the numbers from 1 to 12 and, where appropriate, a small set of supporting characters — in most cases, the international currency symbols, a colon, full stop, hyphen, slash and the number sign. 10, 11 and 12 I opted to place in the capital A, B and C slots. Each font is shown in its entirety here. I soon passed 12, so the next logical finish line was 24. Like a typographic Jack Bauer, I soon passed that too -— the more I researched, the more I came across interesting and unique examples that insisted on digitization, or that inspired me to explore some new design direction. The sources broadened to include tickets, numbering machines, ecclesiastical brass plates and more. Though not derived from clock faces, I opted to keep the 1-12 conceit for consistency, which allowed me to design what are effectively numerical ligatures. I finally concluded one hundred fonts over my original estimate at 112. Even though it’s not strictly divisible by 12, the number has a certain symmetry, I reasoned, and was as good a place as any to round off the project. An overview reveals a broad range that nonetheless fall into several loose categories. There are fairly faithful revivals, only diverging from their source material to even out inconsistencies and regularize weighting or shape to make them more functional in a modern context; designs taken directly from the source material, preserving all the inky grit and character of the original; designs that are loosely based on a couple of numbers from the source material but diverge dramatically for reasons of improved aesthetics or mere whim; and entirely new designs with no historical precedent. As projects like this evolve (and, to be frank, get out of hand), they can take you in directions and to places you didn’t envisage when you first set out. Along the way, I corresponded with experts in railway livery, and now know about the history of cab side and smokebox plates; I travelled to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Nantes, France, to examine their numbering machines; I photographed house numbers in Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam and here in the UK; I delved into my collection of tickets, passes and printed ephemera; I visited the Science Museum in London, the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset, and the Museum of London to source early adding machines, war-time telegraphs and post-war ration books. I photographed watches at Worthing Museum, weighing scales large enough to stand on in a Brick Lane pub, and digital station clocks at Baker Street tube station. I went to the London Under-ground archive at Acton Depot, where you can see all manner of vintage enamel signs and woodblock type; I photographed grocer’s stalls in East End street markets; I dug out old clocks I recalled from childhood at my parents’ place, examined old manual typewriters and cash tills, and crouched down with a torch to look at my electricity meter. I found out that Jane Fonda kicked a policeman, and unusually for someone with a lifelong aversion to sport, picked up some horse-racing jargon. I share some of that research here. In many cases I have not been slavish about staying close to the source material if I didn’t think it warranted it, so a close comparison will reveal differences. These changes could be made for aesthetic reasons, functional reasons (the originals didn’t need to be set in any combination, for example), or just reasons of personal taste. Where reference for the additional characters were not available — which was always the case with fonts derived from clock faces — I have endeavored to design them in a sympathetic style. I may even extend some of these to the full alphabet in the future. If I do, these number-only fonts could be considered as experimental design exercises: forays into form to probe interesting new graphic possibilities.

Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.

Galavant will take you anywhere you want to go! Enjoy three font looks in one; a fun, chunky lower-case, a bold, animated upper-case, and in all-caps with discretionary ligatures turned on, Galavant is tightly interlocking. To explore the interlocking possibilities, turn some ligatures off and others on until you settle on the best combo. There are over 260 two, three, and four-letter ligatures available. Discover interlocking ligatures featuring lower-case "i" along the road as well. In sentence-case, turn discretionary ligatures off, except to add more handmade variation in double-letter pairs and to access a fine "ft". However you roam, Galavant aims to entertain.

If you're feeling a chill in your bones and the grass is a little crunchy under your feet after looking at this font, you might like to put your feet in warm water when you get home if to stave off a little Frostbite. This remastered font family is a chip off the old block, and will help you thaw out before your skin starts to freeze and flake. We recommend you melt Frostbite cubes in the warm water too to ensure you don't stick to the ice. We also recommend you don't lick the letterforms, as we know our customers are wont to do.

When a type design job needs a bit of snap, yet needs to remain unconventional, think of Quirkley JNL. Its name speaks volumes - a bold, quirky sans serif - great for headlines and display work.

Windevere is a family of display faces designed for easily readible headings and titles that convey a sense of speed and motion. The family includes three faces: Windevere Regular, Windevere Bold and Windevere Rounded.

Retro Boldy, a Bold, classy, contemporary of script font, inspired by 90s Era. Retro Boldy offers beautiful typographic harmony for a diversity of design projects, including logos & branding, social media posts, advertisements & product designs.

Rickety Stairs is a cute and neat handwritten font. This adaptable font will look great on a variety of design ideas. It will add a fun and friendly touch to each of your projects!

This font is designed to create typographic textures. It's based on Ankara Display but not in the same family because of some of its different forms. Also, its angular forms give a digital impact.

Modeled from a set of individual painting stencils, Mess Hall JNL is named for the armed services cafeteria where thousands of enlisted men endured bland, boring meals day in and day out for years.

This font consists of individual pieces that can be combined to make a wide variety of borders. For each border design, the pieces generally include four corners, a vertical section, and a horizontal section.

Denso is a font family delivering great force using minimum space. It supports 111 languages, features a total of 309 glyphs and includes an outlined and italicized version for each of the 3 weights.

Contra Condensed is the condensed version of my Contra family of fonts. It is very condensed, but not yet narrow. It is well suited in all situations were one needs to save space. Enjoy!

Movieland JNL is a re-working of Jeff Levine's Art Deco-styled Wingate JNL, with more traditional letter shapes; making it perfect for creating (or recreating) the compact look of movie poster production credits.

Copperplate Classic Light Floral is the latest addition to my Copperplate Classic Group of fonts. The floral decorations go perfectly well together with the classic forms of the Copperplate. Your decorative designer Gert Wiescher.

Designed by Les Usherwood. Digitally engineered by Paul Hickson. Les based the design on a turn-of-the-century typeface of the same name. The foundry is believed to be Soldans & Payvers, circa 1904.

South Town is a simple and flowing handwritten font. This adaptable font will look great on a variety of design ideas. It will add a fun and friendly touch to each of your projects!

Mastone was inspired by the bubble typography trends nowadays in the graphic design industry. A fresh mix of y2k culture, streetwear visuals, and brutalism yet an experimental touch of bubble throw-up graffiti styles.

Seindah Cinttya results out of a stunning pairing of a brush pen that makes it look incredibly endearing and authentic. Use this gorgeous and unique script font to bring any DIY project to life!

Zedou was inspired by old Art Deco flavoured signage from the former French colony of Madagascar. It has a mechanical yet organic feel to it, and consists of four display weights covering Latin Pro.

ITC Tiffany font was designed by Edward Benguiat, a highly contemporary blend of two fonts, Ronaldson and Caxton. The best characteristics of both were combined to produce a refined and refreshing font, ITC Tiffany.

Qara is a breathtaking Didot font that exudes elegance, luxury, and an unparalleled sense of fashion. With its sleek and refined design, Qara captures attention and adds a touch of sophistication to any project.

A stencil font you won't find anywhere else. Part of Market LTD, a collection of limited faces, mostly alpha-numeric and some just plain numeric, used primarily in retail and display situations and titling.

St Transmission was one of the first ambitious projects for Stereotypes. Building a complete family with a lot of weights along with the italics. Transmission supports extended Latin character set, plus Cyrillic and Greek.

This is the "Starslang" font, that features a star shape embedded within the letters of the vowels. The theme was designed to enlighten the mood and spirit with a fun mood of urban atmosphere.

Mighty Oaks is a collection of stylized oak leaves. There are 47 oak leaves located under the character set keys. There is a flopped version of each leaf located under the shift+character key.

Anniversary Seals is composed of a seal design reminiscent of the embossed foil seals used in commemorating company anniversaries. The font contains 100 consecutive characters from the first anniversary through the one-hundredth anniversary.

A new Version of Turquoise Roman Capitals. With specials Tuscan Serifs to add more engraving feel. Turquoise Tuscan is full of ligatures and awesome alternates. Perfect for big headlines, logos, branding and wine labels.

Potenciarte is an all-caps display typeface inspired by the facade of old buildings from the era of Nederlandsch-Indie (1900’s) in Surabaya, where Art Deco & Art Nouveau typographic styles were widely used.

Never Give Up is a simple and friendly handwritten font, featuring the perfect amount of trendiness. This original look will appeal to a wide range of crafty ideas, from letterheads and titles to stationery.

Shayan is an interesting display font inspired by the style and feel of the Middle East Arabic. This font is suitable for branding logos, Ramadan themes, and any other projects you can think of.

Inspired by the former hot-metal fonts of Imprimatur, Gmuender Antiqua Pro is a fresh designed versatile and multilingual serif font family. All five styles contain three different forms of numbers and small caps.

Clobber Grotesk is a grotesk typeface family designed for high readability. It includes a range of weights and a stencil variant. The terminals of the letterforms are slightly flared in order to increase legibility.

»Guilloche B« is a set of graphics that join with each other to form very sophisticated, op-art-like borders. Try them on lots of different assignments, they form very surprising bands or patterns.

Gilas is a beautiful script font, carefully created with a touch of romantic essence. This is a beautiful combination of timeless elegance and authentic calligraphy, and includes beginning and ending swashes for the lowercase.

Bomber was inspired by the lettering used on the vehicles of the U.S. military. This font works great as an old-school style of athletic lettering. Also included is a fifteen character dingbat set.

Belagia is a beautiful script font carefully created with a touch of romantic essence. This is a beautiful combination of timeless elegance and authentic calligraphy, and includes beginning and ending swashes for the lowercase.