The idea started with the 1934 sheet music of “Mazurka Amabile”. Its hand drawn title had most of the letters rendered in a rectangular shape [‘square’ in the sign trade] that featured rounded corners and terminals made by the shape of the lettering pen nib. A few letters were rounder in design than others, so those were scrapped in favor of a more consistent character shape throughout the font. Pen Nib Square JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

If you're regularly compelled to scrawl fiery French poetry, declare independence, or design indie folk albums, then Chris Watson's romantic Steel Pen typeface is for you. With old-school edge and spirited opentype alternates, it's as gallant as type gets.

To blend a handwritten style with a graphical aesthetic, Monotype designers paid attention to the balance between the two, hence harmoniously combine their qualities like a mix of tradition and modern. M Felt Pen references the unified stroke thickness and rounded terminals of rounded Heiti typefaces, imitating the fluidity of marker writing. The linked strokes are vivid and suggest the presence of the human hand.

The 1920 edition of “How to Paint Signs and Sho’ Cards” by E. C. Matthews offered a number of examples of then-modern lettering styles for sign painters and show card writers. A bold display alphabet made with a round lettering nib is now available as Show Card Pen JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

The hand lettered title on the cover of the 1938 sheet music for “If It Rains – Who Cares” featured a condensed Art Deco typeface made with a round nib pen. The square shaped characters with rounded corners were a perfect subject for a digital font revival, and are now available as Dip Pen Deco JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

A 1935 song with the unusual title of "Dinner for One Please, James" had its title hand lettered on the cover of the sheet music with simple, condensed letters made by a round point dip pen. This has been reproduced in a digital font as Pen Lettering Sans JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Any prototype you can imagine, Skolar Sans can materialise. This industrious type family is more than just a versatile partner for our award-winning Skolar collection: it is a true sans-serif type system envisioned for the age of responsive design. We developed Skolar Sans to accommodate contemporary typographers and the challenges they confront: an ever-changing spectrum of outputs and devices, in which serious typography can get lost. Skolar Sans is engineered to cope with complex editorial texts and data-rich layouts alike. Its construction is designed for easy reading, and its subtle personal style and a touch of flourish. From gently thin to black, the finely-tuned weight variants will fit any composition from wide-screen dashboards to compact mobile editorial designs. Its four subtly graded width variants allow you to fit any page context with comfort. The 72 styles; 36 weight and width variants in uprights and true italics with ligatures, arrows, scientific figure variants, and fleurons. The two variable fonts (one for uprights and one for the italics) allow user precise navigation of the Skolar Sans design space and streamline delivery. The linguistic scope of Skolar Sans PE is an exact match to Skolar PE: Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek (including polytonic) scripts and support for hundreds of languages and transliterations.

The two great technical constraints a type designer can tackle are low resolution, which limits detail and dictates proportions between negative and positive shapes, and uniform width, which restricts each letter to a fixed horizontal space. Wrestle with both at once, and each letter becomes a black-and-white chessboard that challenges every design decision. Sometimes battling these constraints gets in the way of a good idea, but other times, tinkering with fewer options can make the job irresistibly easy and lead straight to a grid addiction. Gridlite, an experiment with a modular negative space, is the side effect of such an addiction. It’s simplified, monospaced, and variable: foreground and background alike are ready to be animated, typed, scaled up, scaled down, rounded, or otherwise deformed. Gridlite is primarily a variable font with axes that control the size of the elements, their shape, and the background (one for the rectangular field and one for the compact envelope around the letters). The fonts cover Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts. Small caps are included, for no apparent reason ... and there is a monospaced elephant, too.

Clone Rounded is a retrofuturist typeface by Lasko Džurovski from Macedonia, fusing the vintage look of CRT monospaced forms with the organic mutability of a multi-weight, proportional family fit for reading. This lovechild of cyber-culture and genetic font modification takes inspiration from coding, technology, and architecture. Its quasi-monospaced design gives a nod to the quirkiness of engineered fonts but bends enough to never sacrifice a natural reading experience. Biomechanical morphology augmenting a laboratory-built frame.

The LCT Ragnarök is inspired by the cinematographic universe. Its thick and generous shape makes this typeface naturally stand out. In addition, its lines embody soft serifs thus adding elegance to it. This original font endows two styles; regular and slant. It is an asset for the creation of titles, logos or even generics. LCT Ragnarök encompasses a rich alphabet going from Latin PRO going to Greek , Polytonic Greek and Cyrillic.

The lettering found on an 1878 Salt Lake City advertisement for the Forepaugh’s Circus inspired Faux Pas JNL, which is a bit of a pun on the circus’ name and also a commentary on how this unusual lettering style seems to break all of the rules on stroke width and balance. According to Wikipedia: “Adam John Forepaugh (February 28, 1831 - January 22, 1890) was an American entrepreneur, businessman, and circus owner. Forepaugh owned and operated a circus from 1865 through 1890 under various names including Forepaugh's Circus, The Great Forepaugh Show, The Adam Forepaugh Circus, and Forepaugh & The Wild West. In 1889, Forepaugh sold his circus acts to James Anthony Bailey and James E. Cooper and he sold his railroad cars to the Ringling Brothers. The Ringlings used the equipment to transform their circus from a small animal-powered production to a huge rail-powered behemoth, which later purchased the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Thus, in liquidating his circus assets, he indirectly contributed to the demise of his arch-rival.” Faux Pas JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Shock and Awe is a family of two display typefaces drawn up from lettering that has been at the centre of major historical events. Enola Gay is based upon nose art from the B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, in 1945. Tomahawk is based upon the fuselage lettering of the original (then) General Dynamics manufactured Tomahawk cruise missile. Tomahawk missiles were introduced into military service in the 1970s and have been deployed by US and UK 'coalition' forces in a number of conflicts, including both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Aesthetic production by Marcus McCallion.

Whether your subject is scary, or just ancient, this font can help get the right feeling across. PR-Cauldron has capitals based on Uncials, and lowercase based on Celtic Minuscule. “Potion” has a rough finish, and “Curse” has the same letters dripping with gore, suitable for Halloween. Letters are size matched in both fonts, so you can put in as much, or as little messiness as you like. Combines well with: PR Bramble Wood 1, PR Bramble Wood 2, PR Hallow Doodles 01, PR Hallow Doodles 02, PR Swirlies 01, PR Swirlies 05

Hasty Tasty looks like a hastily penned down recipe, a quickly jotted down note or just someone's messy handwriting. It is legible, useful and comes with a full range of accents.

Capitals are messy. Lowercase letters are clean. A drippy, runny, messy graffiti font.

Midnite Movie JNL was inspired by the hand lettered title credits from the 1961 Hammer Pictures film "Curse of the Werewolf" and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Adorably messy handwriting.

A Bottle Brush (a.k.a. Callistemon) is an Australian shrub. Its flowers resemble, well, bottle brushes, hence the name. Bottle Brush is also a very messy, yet quite lovely brush font. I made it with a Japanese brush pen. It comes with a bunch of alternate glyphs, some ligatures and a whole lot of diacritics!

Combustible is a hot, handwritten script font. I don’t really know why I named it Combustible - maybe because I scribbled this one down with near frozen hands. Combustible was made with a medium sized Japanese brush pen. It is a messy script, yet highly legible. Comes with double letter ligatures and a matchbox full of diacritics.