The Octin Prison font family is a veritable powerhouse of design, boasting seven different weights to choose from, each one exuding an air of rugged toughness that is sure to make a statement. Whether you’re looking to create designs for sports teams, schools, police departments, construction sites, or military units, Octin Prison is the perfect choice for projects that require a no-nonsense, utilitarian aesthetic. What sets Octin Prison apart is its ability to capture the essence of its namesake—the prison system—while also offering a versatility that makes it a great option for a wide range of design themes. The font’s thick, bold strokes and sharp, angular edges create a sense of solidity and permanence, while its sleek, modern lines give it a contemporary edge that is sure to grab attention. With weights ranging from light to black, Octin Prison is a font that can be used for a variety of design purposes. The lighter weights work well for smaller text, providing a clean, legible look, while the heavier weights make for an imposing headline font that demands attention. In conclusion, if you’re looking for a typeface that can capture the essence of ruggedness and durability, while also offering versatility and style, look no further than Octin Prison. It’s a font that is sure to make a statement and leave a lasting impression on anyone who sees it. Check out the rest of the Octin families: Octin Sports, Octin College, Octin Stencil, Octin Vintage & Octin Spraypaint. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Allen Zuk has designed this wacky typeface that he calls KOOKY. Each character has three variants that bounce about the baseline. The effect is a randomly casual appearance that is great for headlines. The OpenType version does this automatically by using contextual alternates in applications that recognize this option.

This font is based on real prints made out of a linocut. The glyphs were handprinted, then scanned and then turned into a computer font.

Animated types like this one have been around for fifty or more years. They certainly add a sense of liveliness to a headline. This one trades upon the "wrong way weights" of the old French Clarendon. Think of it as Barnum with Bounce.

In 1925, at the request of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, the foundry he worked for, Oswald Bruce Cooper designed a wide selection of "screamers", oversized exclamation points used to grab attention in display advertising. The foundry rushed the screamers into production, much to Cooper's dismay. Cooper was disappointed with the final form of the screamers– they were designed in assorted weights to match the assorted Cooper series of typefaces, as well as in a variety of other formal solutions- squaredoff, incised, wavy, Tuscan, and rounded. Cooper's working design methodology was to re-draw his projects a number of times in order to refine the formal results. However the screamer project was hastily cut by the head of BB&S's matrix engraving room in fourteen sizes from the initial sketches, causing Cooper to fire off a fiery missive stating, "Everything I draw is bum the first half-dozen times I draw it; the trouble with these is that I drew them only once!" This typeface is the result of researching Cooper's original drawings and series of engraved proofs for the screamers, as well as the original Screamer type specimen. Cooper Screamers have never been available before in digital format.

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.

Orkhon inscriptions (Orkhon inscriptions, Orkhon inscriptions, Khöshöö Tsaidam monuments (also known as Khoshoo Tsaidam, Koshu-Tsaidam or Höshöö Caidam) or Kul Tigin steles (simplified Chinese: 阙特勤碑; traditional Chinese: 闕特勤碑; pinyin: Què tèqín bēi )) They are two monumental installations written by the Göktürks in the Old Turkic alphabet in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia at the beginning of the 8th century. They were erected in honor of two Turkish princes Kül Tigin and his brother Bilge Kagan. Both Chinese and Old Turkish inscriptions describe the legendary origins of the Turks, the golden age of their history, their subjugation by the Chinese and their liberation by İlteriş Kağan. According to one source, the inscriptions contain "rhythmic and parallel passages" similar to those of epics. In the Old Turkish Alphabet, 38 letters are accepted academically and this pattern is generally used in the books. But there are more than 38 letters in this alphabet, these special letters are included in this font.

Dorriss girls were the dancing troop at the Moulin Rouge. I had the idea for this font while trying to come up with an alternative to beveling. I thought it would be interesting to create this sort of stepped effect as I've never really seen this treatment on a font before. Then my need to create chaos shows up again with Doriss Girls informal. A hand drawn take on the forms. This seemed like it would appear on an old art nouveau poster by the great Toulouse Lautrec, so there you have the genesis of this font. I've been somewhat compelled by the letterforms so I may expand and create a more normal version of this font someday with a range of weights. That would be the bees knees.

From the depths of an antique civilization is born "Nahual" inspired by my ancestral Prehispanic Culture, with traits that allows it to mimetize itself, hours of painstaking dirty work with the only goal to show all it knows we want to see, to finally give the Jaguar "Serifclaw" attack. This is a display fontface, it comes in two types, "Claw" basically the text font, and "Copete" that are the construction pieces for every single glyph of the entire font, this last also has the negative spaces of some glyphs (a, e, o, A, B, O, for example) I include them but I prefer the font without them. Comments are welcome! rodrigonabo@gmail.com

Art into type In 2008, Fontsmith were approached by their friend, Jon Scott, to investigate whether a typeface could assume the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon’s not-for-profit charity, Measure, was organising an event for the artist, Conrad Shawcross, whose giant mechanical installation, entitled Chord, was going on public display in the long-disused Kingsway tram tunnel in Holborn. Chord explores the way we perceive time, as either a line or a cycle. Two enormous machines with dozens of rotating arms and moving in opposite directions, weave rope with almost infinite slowness. An unusual brief Phil Garnham visited Conrad in his Hackney studio to get a feel for his work and ideas. “Conrad is a very clever and philosophical guy. He struggled to see how typeface design had any relevance to him and his art. This was going to be a challenge.” The artist presented the type designer with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and mathematical workings. “This was, in essence, my brief.” Phil developed three concepts, the simplest of which ticked all the boxes. “The idea of the strokes in the letterforms appearing and ending at peaks or points of origin fitted perfectly with Conrad’s idea of time occurring and ending at two ends of the sculpture.” Two versions Phil planned modules for two versions of the typeface: one with five lines in the letterforms and one with seven. He then drew the modules on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is FS Conrad. “This is not a simple headline typeface,” says Phil. “It’s not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, and it’s informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as piece of functioning, harmonious type.”

The Algerian designer Taouffik Semmad created the fonts in 1997. Taouffik Semmad grew up speaking Algerian-Arabic dialect and French, studied Russian, and is now living in Montreal. This could perhaps explain his current passion, to "find a universal writing", which he admits is a Utopian idea. Created with brush and Chinese ink, the characters of ITC Atmosphere came from Semmad's hand but only after they were fully formed in his mind's eye.

Naïve Inline is a layered serif handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. We designed three weights to assure a good readability whatever the size. They can be enhanced with five different interior patterns and three shadows to improve your designs and bring a charming and unusual feeling. To do so, you can simply superimpose the layers with a compatible software like Photoshop, the weight above and the pattern(s) below, then choose a color for each. This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif, and a special Art Deco one. Just click on our foundry name to see them all! We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Karlgeorg Hoefer designed Beneta in 1991, inspired by the Littera beneventana, the script of the Benedictine scribes from the 10th to the 12th century. During this time, scribes began to use wider pens and set them at a 45 degree angle to the paper, which caused their scripts to have radical stroke contrasts. This script was mainly used for books and certificates but disappeared by the end of the 13th century. Beneta revives the characteristics of this historic script, changing a line of text into an almost ornamental space. Beneta should be used in middle to larger point sizes for shorter texts and headlines.

One of my dreams as a type-designer was making a good looking chancery cursive. Full of life, like some of the best calligraphers around the world do on their artworks. With Julian Waters, John Stevens and Denis Brown (just to name a few of them) (1) chancery, or italic script, was transformed into a new, exciting and very fresh style of calligraphy mainly at the end of 20th Century. Dream Script may be that dream named above made true. I have been practicing chancery in the way I learnt from those calligraphers for many years now. Making a font out of my ink-sketches was a tough work, since they were closer of -being art- than of -being type-. However, this font rescues many aspects of handmade calligraphy: You have to look at it really close to notice it is actually a font, and that was one of my goals. The secret of a good looking chancery is on its subtle details: pen angle is constantly changing, even on the strokes which seem straight. Capitals and swashes have to be done a little faster than lowercase letters. The rhythm has to be even, in spite of its playful look. The fact that makes Dream look alive is that it has many alternates per glyph. This makes each word look unique like it happens in calligraphy: you will find alternates for the beginning/ending of a word/phrase, some for the middle of it, some interchangeable. Also, to accompany the script, you will find Dream Caps, which was inspired in the eternally beautiful trajan capitals. Place them like I did on the posters and you will have great results for sure. The font works great in small, middle and big sizes and can be a great selection for magazines, wedding invitations, perfumes, and posters. Close your eyes, and Dream with me... TECHNICAL Dream Script Pro is the most complete style, it contains all the alternates and ligatures (OT programmed, better if you use Adobe applications) If you plan to use the font for text, be sure to activate the less decorative capitals, which are placed in the “salt” group of alternates. Dream Script Standard has less glyphs than the Pro one, it contains just some ligatures for a better legibility. (OT programmed, better if you use Adobe applications) NOTES (1) Not only are they great artists, but also good people, who are always willing to share with their students all what they know. I would also like to thank Ricardo Rousselot, whose work inspired me this time to make “The Dream Script” exlibris; and to Alisara Tareekes, a very talented friend which international calligraphy conferences gave me: She kindly helped me with some tips to make this font better.

Cantiqe the rational serif with a circular/ball terminal and strong vertical contrast and fine horizontal hairlines, This makes Cantique a blend of elegant and beautiful. Cantiqe Incredibly versatile is perfect for fashion branding or editorial designs. this font fits a wide pool of designs, elevating them to the highest levels. Add this font to your favourite creative ideas and notice how it makes them come alive! Thank You _xdCreative

Spring has come is a stylish modern handwritten script. It has an unique, striking look which can be used to make any design stand out. Incredibly versatile, this font fits a wide pool of designs, elevating them to the highest levels. Add this font to your favorite creative ideas and notice how it makes them come alive! This font is PUA encoded which means you can access all of the glyphs.

Mesquite is a narrow Tuscan-style typeface designed at Adobe in 1990. Like older Tuscans from the 19th Century, Mesquite has elaborate, creative serif treatments-although the serifs are so unique that it is difficult to call them serifs anymore, they are more like pointy finials. A convex-concave-convex ornamental feature appears on the middle of each vertical and diagonal stroke. Together with the serifs" at the tops and bottoms of each stroke, this feature creates a "tri-band" pattern over text set in Mesquite. Mesquite is not a text face. Aside from its narrowness and decorative qualities, Mesquite has no lowercase. The font's uppercase glyphs have been directly copied and placed in the lowercase range."

Falstaff first appeared with Monotype in 1931, an alphabet in the style of a wide, bold antiqua that was especially popular in the first third of the 19th century. Such typefaces distinguished themselves through their consistent basis in the transitional antiqua style. They are characterized by their extremely fine unflexed serifs with no curve connecting them to the thick strokes. The numerals with their generous curves and ball-like stroke endings and beginnings are particularly decorative. The vertical strokes are dominant and give lines of this typeface a column-like and therefore static look. Falstaff is today often used for book titling, especially for mystery novels. It is best used sparingly in middle and larger point sizes.

Some words from the designer... The bold, playful element is everything in ITC Surfboard. West coast designer Teri Kahan was inspired by California's surfing lifestyle, and the letters of this alphabet dance along the writing line. The vitality of ITC Surfboard comes from the tension between its very free shapes and the precise edges and angles that create them. This all-capital font has deliberately tight spacing and works best in large sizes. Also included are fun, abstract surf/sail graphics.

The origin of this font was a frieze in the RAF Chapel in Westminster Abbey which Michael Harvey was commissioned to design and create. It was comprised of the names of the top brass in wartime Bomber Command, namely Dowding, Harris, Newall, Tedder, Portal and Douglas. The Brief was to cut the letters in bronze and gild them. Instead, they were cut in perspex and gilded. To sit comfortably within the long and narrow vertical space available beneath the chapel’s stained glass window, extended letterforms were used with many vertical serifs omitted and with lengthened horizontal serifs. Some twenty years later, the missing upper-case letters were drawn together with the lowercase letters and Frieze, the font, was born. Subsequently, additional weights and styles were added to create a font family of six styles.

From the standpoint of calligraphy, a font family of capitals and uncials makes perfect sense. The Roman square capitals, the quadrata, are matched by round capitals of older Greek origin; the word "uncus" means hook-shaped like a beak or talon. Interrelated and often interchangeable, these capital letters served as book hands for both the Latin West and the Greek-speaking East before they evolved into minuscule alphabets. The Testament family is based on the few formal capital manuscripts of the Bible, Virgil and Homer that have survived from the ancient world. Throughout the Middle Ages both uncials and square capitals were used, often together, for headings and initial characters. By their nature the Roman capitals are the voice of Caesar and hold the place of authority, while the uncials speak for the Church in a balanced relationship. In ancient times church and state were not as separate as they are now, and the alphabets were not as different as typographic tradition has made them. In this calligraphic rendering it is clear that they are of the same substance and can be written in the same style, conveying even to the modern eye the eternal and classical quality of epic and scripture. Testament comes in all popular font formats, and includes support for a vaster-than-usual range of Latin-based languages.

Supporting Cast JNL is a hybrid of similar designs for hand lettering found on title cards from two morality photoplays from 1936 dealing with drug abuse, "Cocaine Fiends" and "Marihuana" respectively. The films were produced with the hope of educating the public against the dangers of illicit drugs, but they have taken on a cult status because of the dated approach to the problem. Despite all this, it is the Deco-influenced hand lettering which is being celebrated in this font release, not the subject matter of the films.

Franko Luin, Marco Polo's designer, on this typeface: Marco Polo is a 'massacrated' oldstyle typeface that can be used in the same way as, e.g., Caslon Antique. I designed it - if the word design is appropriate in this case - to give the users an alternative so that they are not always directed to the same choice. For the same reason I made Marco Polo rounder. The name comes from the famous Venetian globetrotter, who has nothing at all to do with the typeface, since printing and punchcutting were still an invention of the future.

The inspiration for this typeface family came from my childhood experiences at West Monkton, amidst an historic part of the South West of England. Studies of the original incised capitals of the Trajan column in Rome were analysed and polished for this modern version. The lower case letterforms and numerals were then created in sympathy, taking their proportions from the incised letters of local gravestones. Its name honours not only the area where the original alphabet was conceived and drawn, but also the people responsible for fostering my initial interest in letters.

In Adrian Frutiger, the discipline of a mathematically exact mind is joined with an unmistakable artistic sense. His independent work possesses the controllable language of letterforms. Personal and intensive, this work is the manifestation of his expressive will. Frutiger's precise sense of outline reveals itself two- or three-dimensionally in wood, stone, or bronze, on printing plates and in the form of reliefs. However, even his independent work can be understood as objectivized signs; in their symbolism, they are embedded in the fundamental questions of human existance. They might have developed in the spirit of playfulness, but their nature is always conceptual, directed towards a complex, yet harmonic, whole. Following function, form also necessarily follows the content of the language. The entire spiritual world becomes readable through letters. Essentially, Adrian Frutiger attempts to fathom the basic, central truth which defines our lives: change, growth, division - beginning and end. In a virtual synthesis, he seems to close the circle in which the world reflects itself in symbolic forms. Frutiger Stones is for Adrian Frutiger the example of his formal artistic sensibility par excellence. Searching for the fundamental elements in nature, he has discovered the pebble, rounded and polished over innumerable years by gently flowing water. And out of this, he has created his complete system, a ruralistic typeface of letters and symbols. It depicts animals and plants, as well as astrological and mythical signs. Because of its unique aura, Frutiger Stones is particularly well-suited to different purposes - in headlines and prominent pictograms, as symbol faces, illustrations, and more.

Fruitygreen is Indonesian designer Andi AW. Masry's second typeface following Coomeec™. Idiosyncratic but appealing forms are the signature feature of Fruitygreen™ and provide this new typeface with its truly distinctive character that you can utilize for your projects - and not just in headlines. The unique forms of fruits are not only individually fascinating, but are just as captivating when they are brought together, for example as decoration on a dining table. For Masry, these can be compared with an alphabet whose letters spell out in combination different words and with this as his inspiration, he based his designs for Fruitygreen on the versatile forms of fruits. However, it was not the whole fruits as such but rather small sections of their curves and ends that he decided to use. It is not only because of the characteristic line terminals that the rounded characters of Fruitygreen seem at first glance reminiscent of a brush-written calligraphic typeface; these are traces of the creation process, in which Masry used a digital brush. At the same time, Fruitygreen is by no means simply a brush font. Its dynamic characters reference biological forms and there is definitely something amoeba-like about them, particularly in the bolder variants, and they exude the same serenity and harmony that is inherent to organic structures. The many unconventionally shaped characters also provide for optical contrast. There is, for example, the very scaled down g", the open "q" and the lowercase "r", which has the form of the capital letter. Other letters, such as the sinuous "k" and the rounded uppercase "F" impart an exotic touch to Fruitygreen. Similarly remarkable is the "@", that has only a semi-circle. Available to the designer are other characters that can be used to accentuate a design, such as swash capitals and numerous ligatures. And, last but not least, there are also various numeral sets with oldstyle and lining figures for setting proportional text and table columns together with a selection of symbols, such as arrows and, appropriately, fruits. "

This typeface was designed specifically for producing movie posters, as well as VHS and DVD packaging for them. The uppercase letters are ultracondensed, and the lowercase letters are small caps, approximately a third the size of the uppercase. Also included are various logos and symbols suitable for the intended use, including those for MPAA ratings, and various audio and video formats. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

This growing family of friendly faces is based on the typeface Bravour, designed in 1913 by Martin Jacoby-Boy for the D. Stempel AG foundry in Frankfurt am Main. The wide stance and very large x-height shared by the family members makes them warm and inviting, and equally suitable for use in headlines or text blocks. All versions of this font include the Unicode 1250 Central European character set in addition to the standard Unicode 1252 Latin set.

Calligrapher Margaret Layson works in partnership with Australian typographer Harry Pears, bringing designs such as the wonderful Lindisfarne Nova family to life. They both work on the digital incarnation in a true collaboration. Originally from the UK, Margaret began her professional career as a geophysicist. After arriving in Australia in 1968, she began to work as a freelance calligrapher. Over the years she has maintained an interest in the history of writing, particularly the scripts and decorations in manuscripts.

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.

The name Type Warmers JNL traces its lineage to small catalog booklets issued by Indianapolis' Cobb Shinn for his line of letterpress cuts; of which a few can be found included within this typeface. Presumably type could "warm up to" these stock illustrations and work hand-in-hand to deliver the message, hence the "Type Warmers" sobriquet. Originally known for illustrating many attractive and comical postcards of the early 1900s, Shinn moved into the field of purchasing stock art and redistributing them as electrotypes or "cuts", the predecessor to today's digital clip art. A number of the cartoons he sold can be found in the Shinn Kickers JNL font.

In 1952, Charles Peignot made a bold and fortuitous move: he invited a young Swiss designer to Paris to be the art director of the Deberny & Peignot type foundry. This started the professional type design career of Adrian Frutiger; and since then he has designed an astonishing range of masterful typefaces. One of the earliest for Deberny & Peignot was Président, a sharp-seriffed Latin titling face. Latin" is a typographic designation for roman typefaces with wedge or triangular-shaped serifs, a stylistic form that Frutiger would return to later with his beautiful typeface Méridien. Président™ has wide, solid shapes; very little contrast between thick and thin strokes; and an air of assurance. Use this titling font for business cards, announcements, or artistic signage."

The Vinča script is a cache of symbols found belonging to the Vinča culture of the central Balkans over 7000 years ago. The symbols have been a topic of debate amongst historians. The Tărtăria tablets are three tablets discovered in 1961 in the village of Tărtăria(Hungarian: Alsótatárlaka). This is about 30 km (19 mi) from Alba Iulia in Romania.The tablets, dated to around 5300 BC, have symbols inclay: the Vinča symbols. Some claim they are a yet undeciphered language. If this is so, they would be the earliest known form of writing. In 1908 similar symbols were found during excavations, by Miloje Vasić (1869–1956) in Vinča. This is a suburb of Belgrade (Serbia), some 300 km from Turdaș. Later, more were found in another part of Belgrade. Since 1875 over one hundred and fifty Vinča sites have been found in Serbia alone. Many, including Vinča itself, have not been fully excavated. The culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture. Although some of these symbols look exactly the same as some letters in Etruscan, Greek, and Aramaic, they are generally regarded as a an original, independent development.