A circa-1940s textbook for the Esterbrook Drawlet Pens (similar to Speedball pens) offered numerous samples of lettering that could be obtained by following the simple directions and using the book as a guide. One example was a classic Art Deco design made with a round nib pen, and it has been redrawn digitally as Lettering Book JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Pageu is a handmade font written with a real brush pen. Written with quick movements using a brush pen. It's Handwritten with quick dry strokes. Suitable for those who need a font with real textures

Script Love is a connected cursive script appearing as hand written in three weights: fine pen, pen & marker. Script Love features extended characters, containing West European diacritics & ligatures, making it suitable for international environments & publications.

Sabat Brush is a handmade font written with a real brush pen. Written with quick movements using a brush pen. It's Handwritten with quick dry strokes. Suitable for those who need a font with real textures.

This typeface reproduces letters written with a broad-nib pen casually by hand. The pen direction is close to vertical. Designed to create captions for illustrations, especially children's books, as well as for inscriptions in balloons of comics.

Broad pen script typeface from 1930s magazine advertising.

Woebegone is a cute little handmade font. I started off by drawing the glyphs with a Pilot pen, then added some strokes with a Japanese brush pen. Woebegone comes in Regular and Italic and has all the accents you need.

Dschoyphul is a serifed typeface that was crudely drawn with a pen. It is sloppy and irregular. It was one of several efforts to draw a serifed typeface by pen; see also SarahfSlob, which contains a complete family of styles.

Xahosch uses a calligraphic pen to form a set of letters in which circular elements are based on a bottom-heavy egg shape. A pen-drawn san-serif face, it is available in three weights, each with an italic style.

Broad pen script typeface from 1930s and 40s; magazine advertising.

Broad pen script typeface from 1930s and 40s; magazine advertising.

Broad pen script typeface based on late 1960s Turkish signage.

Broad pen script typeface from 1930s and 40s; magazine advertising.

Broad pen script typeface based on late 1960s Turkish signage.

When master letterer Hugh Gordon and his student, Ross F. George developed a set of lettering pens between June 16, 1913 and Sept. 1, 1914, they had no idea that their invention (which they named Speed-Ball®) would still be in use nearly a hundred years later. The C. Howard Hunt pen company [originally of Camden, New Jersey] became the original (and sole) distributor of these pens. By 1915 an instructional booklet entitled "Modern Pen Lettering" was produced, and it was copiously illustrated with examples of layouts, lettering techniques and an assortment of alphabets for the user to learn. Nouveau Poster JNL is Jeff Levine's interpretation of a sanserif design found within the pages of this vintage publication.

Gladstone is a charming script typeface inspired by pen lettering techniques.

The Quill font is based on classic Renaissance broad-pen calligraphy.

The Fishface font contains a collection of pen-drawn, ornamental Pi characters.

Poing is an exceptionally elegant script, I took my fathers Penn font and pimped it to a higher level. It is perfect for invitations and business cards.

This font was based on calligraphic letters I made with pen size 2B.

Hand drawn felt pen font. Vector grunge style design for your posters or prints.

This font was written with a calligraphic pen, loosely based on old-school calligraphy.

Norwich is a grungy version of the font Tenison and provides real blobby pen handwriting.

Mister Dorky is a grungy, jumpy and warm handwritten font made with an inky pen!

This is Resalaty added Arabic features with a pen handwriting style, for more fun text

Notebug looks like there was a bug playing around with an inky pen. Notebook with a bug = Notebug! Made with a hefty inky pen and quick strokes. You got 3 layers to play around with: Regular (the outline) Fill (The "inside" of the Regular version and Layer (best used as a background layer for Regular)

Prospector JNL is based on a lettering example found in an old Speedball-pen lettering handbook.

Fabrice is a font based on my handwriting, which has been reworked to be turned into a font. I write differently with each pen I use, and this font corresponds to my handwriting while using a pen I refill myself with special inks. It contains a wide range of characters, and will be readable anywhere, yet different!

A quirky and unusual Art Deco monoline typeface can be found within the pages of the Esterbrook Drawlet Pen instruction book [circa the 1940s]. Drawlet was the direct competitor to Speedball Lettering pen nibs. This unusual type design of varying width and character shapes is now available digitally as Oddly Deco JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

At first glance, the lettering style of Technopen JNL seems to emulate the computer-age fonts of the 1980s. In actuality, this font is derived from an alphabet sample found in an instructional booklet for the Esterbrook Drawlet Pens. The Drawlet line was Esterbrook's answer to the iconic Speedball pen points sold through their chief competitor, the Hunt Pen Manufacturing Company. So, what seems to be late 20th Century typography is actually from vintage source material. In fact, the entire contents of the instructional booklet were copyright 1929! A few minor changes were made to the original A-Z alphabet and additional characters were added. The name Technopen is a shortening of the term 'technical pen', which is both a nod to the techno age of the 80s and the technical instruments of the past utilized for drawing and lettering.

An elegant yet down-to-earth script based on the pen lettering of the writer, Christopher Stocks.

A 1960 edition of the Speedball® Pen lettering instruction book yielded the model for China Doll JNL.

A free-spirited hand-script font. Very similar to pre-computer hand-written letttering with a ruling pen.

Joyosa is an elaborate script written with a broad pen; it gives the impression of a flowing ribbon.

NorPen Script is a handwritten Text Font made with an arabic calligraphy pen (my favorite pens) witch can be used with any word processing program for text and display use, print and web projects, apps and ePub, Comic Books, graphic identities, branding, editorial, advertising, scrapbooking, cards and invitations … or even just for fun! It comes with 2 weights: Regular and Italic.

Letterpress Extras JNL gathers more re-drawn images from the rich trove of vintage letterpress cuts. There's plenty of pointing hands and decorative ornaments, a few cartoons and some assorted miscellany. Also included are images of dip pen nibs from an old catalog and a decorative border set. To access the pen points, use the shift key and type any numeral key.

Plymouth is a pen-drawn calligraphic font of narrow proportions featuring plain capitals and an alternate range with swashes.

In the July 24, 1915 issue of “Dry Goods Reporter” is a demonstration of hand lettering rendered with the use of a “speed pen”. Two suggested examples cited in the accompanying article were the Payzant pen and the then-new Speedball pen. An ornate Art Nouveau serif alphabet is displayed, with some examples having delicate floral elements entwining the letters. The initial alphabet was auto-traced, then cleaned-up and modified to recreate the core design of the basic (unadorned) letters. The numerals, punctuation and all additional characters were then made from scratch. Nouveau Rose JNL is the finished result, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.