The gifted Hungarian punch-cutter and printer Miklós Kis was active in Amsterdam in the 1680s. Among the many fonts that he cut during those years were a ‘mediaen’ (pica-sized) roman and italic, and the digital Miklós fonts are an interpretation of these ‘mediaen’ types. The character set has been extended to cover all the European languages that use the Latin alphabet, and the fonts offer OpenType features such as small capitals; old-style and lining figures, both proportional and tabular; fractions; superior and inferior numbers; superior alphabet; contextual and stylistic alternates; and intelligent application of long ‘s’.

Jobst Gutknecht was a highly successful printer in the city of Nuremburg from 1514 to 1542. He published the "Achtliederbuch" (the first Lutheran hymnal, with a whole 4 tunes) and many works by Martin Luther. This font is an accurate "recutting" of the font face Gutknecht used for the body text in his printed works. It has been extended to over 900 glyphs adding hundreds for modern use. It also presents many ancient things like old ligatures such as "tz", a hedera, and alternate style pilcrow for visual interest. And for those conservative types the modern lower case "k" is also available.

Peter Schoeffer was a printer who was apprenticed to Gutenburg and after leaving Gutenburg in 1455 he set up shop with Facob Fust. His son, Peter the Younger, moved to Mainz and carried on the trade. This particular font is based on a typeface of Peter the Younger that was cut circa 1509-1520. This font has over 900 characters. While there are only about 80 in the historical exemplar the rest have been developed for modern usage. This font is based on Typ.7:146/148G also known as Gesellschaft für Typenkunde plate no. 258.

In the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution there was a desire for a clear classical blackletter font without frills. That is why in 1793 the famous printer and editor Johann Friedrich Unger and his partner Johann Christian Gubitz accomplished their own fraktur. Now you will be able to use both regular and bold styles of this highly readable blackletter font. It is recommended to activate both OT features Standard and Discretionary Ligatures to access all ligatures in both these fonts. Typing N-o-period and activating the ordinal feature gives you the numero sign.

Hand-hewn along the banks of the mighty River Raisin in Southeast Michigan, this heavy block typeface is the perfect addition to any design project in need of a stout, yet fun typographical treatment. Before this font made its journey into the outside world, it began its life as a 4B pencil sketch on cheap inkjet printer paper, as many of my projects do. This typeface, not unlike me, doesn't waste its time with finesse, or convention, and truly doesn't mind being a little bit on the thick side. There is a time for refinement and propriety, but this ain't it.

Casual Face is a display variable font with a natural handwritten feeling. The font supports Latin and Cyrillic uppercase characters, numerals, and the main set of punctuation and symbols. The character of the font is based on the classic sign-painter casual script. The font’s option variability is upright and slanted letters up to 17 degrees. This enables the designer to define the gradient himself and be free to create designs suitable for advertising, packaging, and events. The font is perfect for headlines and personal products with casual characters and the mood conveyed is warm, and relaxed.

A few bold caps drawn by Albert Du Bois for the 1906 Henderson Sign Painter book started me in the direction of looking at how sign painters approached slabs after the industrial revolution. The usual happened from there. My exercise in the early lettering roots of what eventually became the definition of geometric typography ended up having a life of its own. The majuscules led to minuscules, one idiosyncratic bold weight led to six more, and uprights led to italics. What was kind-of-interesting in the early twentieth century persuaded me to make it interesting enough a century later. This of course meant alternates, swashes, the standard baggage that keeps calling my name. Henderson Slab is a family of seven weights plus italics, all full of open features and extended Latin language support. Part of this family’s appeal is its coverage of nearly the entire of the slab serif through the last 100 years — the basis is the manual, humanist origins, the swashed forms come right out of the phototypesetting era, and the alternates and mostly modern constructs of contemporary ideas. The result is a set with the ability to function in modern spaces, from corporate to editorial, in text or display, while both winking and nodding at the roots of what is now considered a geometric endeavor. (Basic version do not include alternates, swashes, etc).

Groovecore is a modern bold serif display font with an unmistakable 1970s vibe. This is a design that is equally at home on a retro t-shirt logo as it is on a stylish fashion headline. The combination of plump rounded serifs and pointy curls sets up a nice graphic interplay of shapes. You'll find Groovecore to be carefully and extensively kerned, with even color weight that's makes it shine even in small extended text passages. Quirky but legible, Groovecore is a great choice in many contexts.

Inspired by an old matchbook which read: "Chop Suey: Finest Chinese and American Cooking". Chop Chop recreates that matchbook printed feel with soft rounded edges on what one would normally expect to be a sharp and pointy typeface. The typeface has two versions of each capital form, one in the capitals and one in the lowercase positions. The Contextual Alternates feature auto-magically swaps every other character with the alternative version allowing you to easily type you message, while creating a little diversity as well.

Avimode is bold, sharp, and futuristic. An original CubicType design with a design inspired by the holes and tracks on printed circuit boards. Text set in Avimode fills almost all the space available to it, and has small details. CubicType therefore recommends using this type at large sizes and with processes that are faithful to its fine details. It would look great cut 2 metres high on the side of your galactic spaceship. Please be aware that some of the lettershapes have sharp pointy corners: HANDLE WITH CARE!

Meet Bjorn. A super usable, digital-device ready type design, refreshingly unburdened by today’s pre-conceived notions of ‘digital neutrality’. This is a typeface driven by the notion that today’s ‘digital’ shouldn’t automatically mean the devolution of typographic personality, Bjorn brings a softer-side to the idea of pixel perfect brand comms. Solid digital typography can also convey a warm tone of voice, radiate a softness, a human emotive charm whilst still maintaining all of the functional on-screen requirements of crisp easy reading fonts across viewports. Bjorn is a distinctive type design that combines a unique blend of flattened round stems (to take the edge-off), levelled inner terminals (pixel friendly) and pointed ears and feet (creating an distinct rhythm and dynamic with bowled letters). Bjorn is not a typeface following a tried and tested pattern, it’s a typeface designed to make digital brands feel special, enabling speech in a voice that brings viewers closer to their words. Bjorn is warm, yet clinical, flat and curved, elliptical and pointy. The font’s strong sense of ‘straightness’, the letter proportions and features build up its versatility across digital environments, not too wide, not too narrow, not too pointy, not too round — just right. Bjorn is available in 4 Roman styles — Light, Regular, Medium and Bold.

Mark van Bronkhorst designed MVB Celestia Antiqua at a time when font choice was limited. Design was characterized by overuse of the few fonts that came with laser printers. A rustic typeface, recalling the roughness and irregularity of pre-digital printing, was a response to the cold crispness of DTP. MVB Celestia Antiqua holds its own among a large group of other “weathered” serif fonts, in part due to the size of the family: three weights, small caps, italics, and two titling styles. But it's also successful because it's simply drawn well, the contours only as rough as they need to be, enabling text at any size, large or small.

Journeyman is an all caps layered display typeface in the sign painter tradition. It has normal width caps in lowercase position and a wider caps in uppercase position. Letters in lowercase position are slightly more rounded than those in uppercase position thus providing two styles. Journeyman supports languages with latin characters and ligatures as well as Greek and Cyrillic. The normal front layer is Line while Silhouette is usually put at the back for a three dimensional effect. Other layer arrangements are possible. The type works well for shop displays, poster work, menus, signage and other purposes where you want the type to have impact.

Stuffed Shirt JNL acquires its name from a term popularized during the years when the Art Deco period flourished. The Great Depression further widened the gap between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. Occasionally, some of those that 'had' (and some who pretended they did) came off as standoffish, egotistical and pompously arrogant. Such individuals were referred to as a "stuffed shirt"; a blowhard who thought he was better than others. In this case, Stuffed Shirt JNL is no more than a dual-line adaptation of Playwright JNL, itself an interpretation of the classic Broadway type design in a way that emulates the hand lettering of old-time sign painters.

Günther Zainer, (or Zeyner or Zeiner), was the first printer to operate in the city of Augsburg. He was active from 1468 to his death in 1478. In that single decade he was responsible for printing 80 works. Most of these editions were for the clergy but he also printed the first Calendar and large-scale illustrated book intended for the wider public. This font is based on one of his more interesting and peculiar fonts. And it has been enlarged to include over a 1,000 defined glyphs for modern use and also for historical purposes many glyphs recommended by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative organization have also been included.

This script font was inspired by the 1900s Art Nouveau style, in tribute to the well known American dancer Loïe Fuller. This font is specially developed for the OpenType possibilities. The TTF and OTF versions contain, besides all accented Western European Latin characters and ligatures, small caps, contextual alternates, more than seventy titling alternates, and others... It is used as variously as web-site titles, posters and fliers design or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, menus, certificates, letters. This font supports very strong enlargements as well as small sizes. When printed, it remain perfectly legible and elegant from 7 pts even if using an ordinary inkjet printer .

Staincool is a layered Font, with a retro style, and is inspired by the artist's sign painter style. There are 6 layers that are easy to use. Staincool developed from the Stengkol 04 font (https://www.myfonts.com/font/viaction-type/stengkol/) that is added to 3D fonts. This font is perfect for various design purposes such as labels, merchandise, packaging, logotype, sign and more. The Staincool font is perfect for modern & vintage themes by adjusting the desired color on the 3D layer. This font can be used in Adobe Illustrator & Adobe Photoshop. If you have questions & need help please contact us via message or email.

From 1702 to 1811 the French "Royal", then "Imperial", Printers, neglected Garamond and Fournier's designs and used only the font called "Romain du Roy", carved (1693 to 1723) by Philippe Grandjean by order of the king Louis XIV. 1790 Royal Printing was inspired by various variants of Romain du Roy that were in use during this period. Our sources were mainly official and legal documents printed in the late royal period, and in the beginning of the French revolution. There was no bold style. The 1790 Royal Printing Caps fonts contain small caps, plus titling caps for headlines as 1790 Royal Printing capitals are intended to be used preferably for text.

Eckhardt Bold JNL continues a series of sign painter-inspired type designs and is named in honor of the late Al Eckhardt, a talented sign man who was a good friend of Jeff Levine for about 18 years until his passing. The font is available in both regular and oblique versions and was inspired by an example found in the 1928 edition of E.C. Mattthews' "How to Paint Signs and Sho' Cards". Both squat and wide for maximum use in wall and window applications, the original name for the design is "Heavy Plug". Plug was the sign painter's term at the time for describing this type of letter form.

Alf Becker was a master sign painter and lettering stylist who created well over 100 alphabets for a monthly feature in the trade magazine "Sign of the Times" during the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST pubications for supplying the source material. One of these designs features a modernized version of Old English or "text" lettering making it more legible for sign and show card work. Doing away with extra curves and swashes, this type style is more calligraphic in nature than classic. Modern English JNL was modeled from Becker's original design, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

This font has been on my drawing board since the late eighties. It was based on drawings provided to me by an old sign-painter family friend and we used it extensively as a caps-only font in the early 90s on a cellphone ad campaign. It loves to be tight set and stacked and provides real grunt when you need it. Small caps have been added and have been weight and proportion adjusted so as to complement the caps. At Type Associates we believe that a font is not complete until the spacing is optimal. Carmel is another example of quality through extensive experience, testing, adjusting and refining.

Floridium grew out of an affection for the old wood types of the 1800s. Painters Roman* was the initial inspiration. It was the source for the �banana� and �snake head� serifs. But the design�released by Adobe as Juniper�was too quirky to be useful. I tried to make it more sophisticated and modern while keeping the original personality of the 19th century types. The name resulted from a trip to Miami while the initial drawings were being made. Not the best way to name a typeface, but while we were in Miami Beach there was this tall blonde in a bright yellow bikini sitting on this bright yellow Porsche and...

An exquisite Didot font in 18 series Ambroise is a contemporary interpretation of various typefaces belonging to Didot’s late style, conceived circa 1830, including the original forms of g, y, &; and to a lesser extent, k. These unique glyphs are found in Gras Vibert, cut by Michel Vibert. Vibert was the appointed punchcutter of the Didot family during this period. It is the Heavy, whom sources were surest that Jean François Porchez has been used as the basis for the design of the typeface family. In the second half of the 19th century, it was usual to find fat Didots in several widths in the catalogs of French type foundries. These same typefaces continued to be offered until the demise of the big French foundries in the 1960s. Ambroise attempts to reproduce more of what we see printed on paper in the 19th century; a more accurate representation of Didot punches. So, the unbracketed serifs are not truly square straight-line forms but use tiny transitional curves instead. The result on the page appears softer and less straight, particularly in larger sizes. The illustrious Didot family of type founders and printers Every variation of the typeface carries a name in homage to a member of the illustrious Didot family of type founders and printers. The condensed variant is called Ambroise Firmin. The extra-condensed is called Ambroise François. Ambroise Pro brought back to life: fifteen years in the making! Club des directeurs artistiques, 48e palmarès Bukva:raz 2001

This set of decorated initial letters was inspired by those used in 1510 in Nancy (France, Lorraine) for printing of "Recueil ou croniques des hystoires des royaulmes d'Austrasie ou France orientale[...]" Author Symphorien Champion, unknown printer. There were three sorts of initials family, but only one complete and clear, except a very few characters. The printer used some letters to represent others, as V, turned over to make a A, D to make a Q, M for E, So, the reconstruction was a little less difficult. Thorn, Eth, L slash and O slash were also added. The original font's letters was only drawn in white on a black background only, but it was tempting to propose a negative version in black on white. A few letters have multiple appearance, but only the A was clear enough to be reproduced. It can be used as variously as web-site titles, posters and flyer design, publishing texts looking like ancient ones, or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, as a very decorative, elegant and luxurious additional font... This font supports strong enlargements revealing its fine details and remaining very smart. Its original medieval height is about one inch equivalent to about three to four lines of characters. This font may be used with all our blackletter fonts, but as well with "1543 Humane Jenson", "1557 Italic" and "1742 Civilite", without any fear about anachronism.

This American original was designed in 1901 by Frederic W. Goudy for the American Type Founders in Jersey City. Copperplate Gothic is an all caps font which looks like a sans serif at first glance. But closer examination reveals tiny, pointy serifs which almost seem to round off the letters. Designers rely on this font’s lofty and sublime impression and it is often seen in advertisements, but it has also made a place for itself in private and business correspondence and corporate design. The AB and BC designations in the style names refer to the relative sizes of the capitals and small capitals.

The GateKeeper typeface was inspired by old horror movies, and the various poster typography that went with some of them. A loose and pointy typestyle, GateKeeper embodies the dark side of typography and life, with a creepy and on edge feeling. With large and small capitals, it is easy to exchange cases in events of double characters, which can lend for a very interesting offbeat quality. Usable for any ocassion, but most suitable for dark matter. Learn about the GateKeeper, study his methods, and pass his test. Get the GateKeeper typeface today, and you are on your way!

The peculiarity of this alphabet is already its origin: the basic drawing was created by narrowing Roman capitals with corresponding lowercase letters. The goal was to create a monumental font for architecture and book covers. Surprisingly, however, Amor Sans has found its way into corporate identity, offices, magazines and packaging design. Its slightly narrowed, economical design predestines it for quick reading of shorter texts, which is why it is also excellent for theater posters and programs. Its moderate width proportions and rich selection of arrows and pointers are excellently used in public spaces. Amor Sans has a neutral expression that works harmoniously in any architectural style. It will serve as an orientation system in a medieval monastery as well as in a modern building, while remaining distinctive even in the dark. The family consists of ten cuts with many functions, such as small capitals, Cyrillic, several types of numerals, a number of ligatures and stylistic alternatives.

The award-winning Scala family (1990-1993) is a worldwide bestseller and has established itself as a ‘classic’ among digital fonts. It was one of the first serious digital text fonts to support small caps, ligatures and different set of numbers. In fact Scala and Scala Sans (1990-1993) are two different typefaces sharing a common form principle: the skeletons of both Scala and Scala Sans are identical. Scala’s dark colour and low contrast works to prevent the thin parts from breaking up. The generous length of Scala italic’s serifs gives it a strong rhythm. The bold weight has the same character widths as the normal weight, so changing a text from normal into bold does not affect the set width. Another part of Scala is very popular among its users: Scala Hands, containing more than one hundred decorative hands and pointers, is a free bonus. Scala Jewels is a set of four highly decorative typefaces, based on the bold capitals of Scala.

The award-winning Scala family (1990-1993) is a worldwide bestseller and has established itself as a ‘classic’ among digital fonts. It was one of the first serious digital text fonts to support small caps, ligatures and different set of numbers. In fact Scala and Scala Sans (1990-1993) are two workhorse-like typefaces sharing a common form principle: the skeletons of both Scala and Scala Sans are identical, therefore they can be combined perfectly. Where many of the modern sans serifs (like Helvetica and Univers) have rather ‘closed’ letter shapes, the same elements in Scala Sans are much more ‘open’. This greatly improves legibility, especially in the smaller point sizes. The italic of Scala Sans is not a slanted version of the roman, but rather a ‘real’ italic. Another part of Scala is very popular among its users: Scala Hands, containing more than one hundred decorative hands and pointers, is included in the Scala fonts and is a free bonus.

The Monotype Janson font family is based on types originally cut by the Hungarian punch-cutter, Nicolas Kis circa 1690. Named after Anton Janson, a Dutch printer. The original matrices came into the hands of the Stempel foundry in Germany in 1919. New type was cast and proofs made; these were used as the source for Monotype's version of Janson. The original hand cut Janson types have a number of small design irregularities which give the typeface its unique charm. These have been carefully incorporated into the new version. The overall effect is of even color and an easy readability that makes Monotype Janson most at home in book and publishing work.

Set of ornaments based on the decorative motifs used by the first typographic workshop in Buenos Aires: “Imprenta de Niños Expósitos”, between 1780 and 1824. This set is the product of an extensive historical research that aims to identify the type that came from Europe to the City during colonial times, and during the first years of Argentina’s independence. This group has a lot of diversity, which fluctuates between organic baroque forms and geometric neoclassical. Its characters can be used in editorial design along with Roman typefaces, they work individually or grouped to form different figures, guards or frames. It was baptized in honor to the first printer who worked in the workshop: the Spanish Agustín Garrigós.

Whenever I've stayed in Munich my friend Michael Bundscherer and I go on a typographical expedition. When we talk about that, we remember the bygone world of sign painter. On one of the facades of a furniture shop in Munich, you can discover the lettering of the name in golden letters. This one convinced us because of the simple elegance Art Deco. These letters on the facade are in any case the character set, which forms the basis of this document. The missing (especially the lowercase letters and the numbers) were modeled. The "OPEN" called version tries to replicate the 3-D effect. The font is particularly suitable for shorter texts and headlines.

FA Komunikat is an experimental and geometrical typeface based on simple elements: a circle, it's parts and straight lines. The typeface communicate the spirit of future, dynamism and modernity. FA Komunikat design was based on the sketch of unique lettering from 1932 made by Władysław Strzemiński, Polish vanguard abstract painter, an artist and a typographer. Strzemiński claimed that modern economic letter forms should be standardized and based on lines and arches. He wrote that readability is a matter of habit and after a practice the new letter forms would be very well readable for everyone. In 2004 Artur Frankowski revived original design creating set of characters, widen up with numerals, punctuation marks and diactrics.

1913 Typewriter Carbon is the bold version of GLC foundry's 1913 Typewriter. It is available in two styles: Normal, and Underlined (Bold). It is a complete alphabetic font. It is used as variously as web-site titles, posters design or books editing. It may be preferable, if possible, when printing, to choose a pale color - dark grey instead of heavy black, for exemple - to give a good appearance, just like the real one, and still benefit from the full details. With inkjet printers, it may be used the economic or draft option with a good result too. The old typewriter characters size is 11 or 12 points, but this font supports easily enlargement.

The Bitstream version of Caslon Bold of the American Type Founders, 1905. Based on William Caslon I’s first English Old Style typefaces of 1725. Caslon modeled his designs based on late 17th century Dutch types, but his artistic skills enabled him to improve those models, bringing a variety of forms and subtlety of details. Strokes in Caslon fonts are somewhat heavier than in earlier Old Style fonts, serifs are thicker and a bit stubby. Italic letters have uneven slope. A text set in Caslon looks legible and aesthetically appealing. Caslon is a favorite font of English printers for setting of classical literature. Cyrillic version was developed for ParaType in 2002 by Isay Slutsker and Manvel Shmavonyan.

A casual and fun-loving font based on the work of showcard artist Albanis Ashmun Kelly, from his 1911 book “Expert Sign Painter,” and named for a long-running comic strip. Both versions of this font contain the complete Unicode Latin A character complement, with support for the Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, Flemish, French, Frisian, German, Greenlandic, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Moldavan, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Provençal, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Romany, Sámi, Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish and Welsh languages, as well as discretionary ligatures and extended fractions.

In researching historic decorative material offered by Lanston Monotype as well as other metal foundries such as Barnhart Brothers and Spindler, there were occasionally ornaments that defied description. Perhaps it was a Victorian sense of humor or someone really thought these were a good idea or perhaps popular taste has just changed so much over the last hundred years, or our forbearers were completely insane. In any case, LTC is somewhat proud to present a collection of the most bizarre, disturbing and baffling printers ornaments we could find. Along with mutant fowl-children and frolicsome amphibians, there are also Masonic and other secret fraternal symbols that may not be creepy to everyone, but just enough to be moderately disturbing.

Eisley started as an experiment with creating brushes in illustrator. I began by drawing each letter and tweaking until each one balanced next to one another. I painted over 50 paint brush strokes to give a variety of different looks to the final characters. Strategically crafted to look as real and as spontaneous as a sign painter might paint up (although possibly running a bit dry on paint giving the end result a vintage and grungy effect). Eisley is perfect for use in any design branding that requires vintage or distressed display lettering. Eisley is perfect for use in any design branding that requires vintage or distressed display text. Great fun to use AND personalize with your own flair.

In a specimen book from Stevens, Shanks & Sons, Ltd. of London (circa1930s) “Royal Gothic” was their version of a classic grotesk sans that had been in use as far back as 1899 when the Keystone Foundry called it “Charter Oak”. The terms "gothic" and "grotesk" were equally applied to early sans serif typefaces – at first not well embraced by printers as being too ugly (grotesque) for use. One familiar characteristic of early grotesk fonts (such as this one) is the numerous variations of character widths and shapes. By combining those two terms into a font name, the digital version of this design is called Gothic Grotesk JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The Bitstream version of Caslon 540 of the American Type Founders, 1902. Based on William Caslon I's first English Old Style typefaces of 1725. Caslon modeled his designs based on late 17th century Dutch types, but his artistic skills enabled him to improve those models, bringing a variety of forms and subtlety of details. Strokes in Caslon fonts are somewhat heavier than in earlier Old Style fonts, serifs are thicker and a bit stubby. Italic letters have uneven slope. A text set in Caslon looks legible and aesthetically appealing. Caslon is a favorite font of English printers for setting of classical literature. Cyrillic version was developed for ParaType in 2002 by Isay Slutsker and Manvel Shmavonyan.