Neat, calligraphy-style handwriting using a chisel-tipped marker.

PARMA is a type-writer style face with the form and elegance of a Bodoni. Functional beauty was the aim of mating the two disparate ideas in one type, creating a utilitarian face with graceful features. We�re even converting the keys on our beloved old Olivetti portable to type in Parma Typowriter. And then we�re going to get a Lambretta scooter to go zipping around in and maybe one of those front opening Fiat cars for drives in the countryside. Hey, waiter! Where�s my order of Giambotti? And more Sangiovese for everyone!

A late nineteenth-century type specimen catalog from Farmer, Little & Co. yielded this droll little typeface, originally called "Arbor". The distinctive decorations of the face suggested a fool's cap, and thus the font got its current name. And don't call me Surely.

Canterbury is a late Medieval Gothic font with a rough edge. This blackletter face is available with four different types of Capital initial letters or combined into one Opentype Pro font with all variations plus historic ligatures, alternates and even a few ornaments.

A classic late nineteenth-century face from the Dickinson Type Foundry of Boston. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1262, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

Gerry Powell’s revival of the condensed and elongated Fat Face, cut for ATF.

Bolton Commercial revives and updates one of Greater Albion's designer's earliest typeface families, Bolton, which was recently used on the credits of a popular UK television series. The family consists of five faces- Regular and Obliqued, Blocked, Embossed and Engraved. All have a late Victorian/Edwardian feel and are ideal for posters, signage, Book covers...and of course television credits! Bolton Commercial combines the virtues of flair, fun and legibility.

Chamfer, released by Barhart Brothers & Spindler in the late nineteenth century, provided the pattern for this simple, elegant headline face. Both flavors of this font feature the 1252 Latin, 1250 Central European, 1254 Turkish and 1257 Baltic character sets.

Originally issued as Apollo by the Central Type Foundry of Saint Louis, this face evokes the glamor of late Victorian era. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

The design of the first "Fat Face" is credited to Robert Thorne just after 1800 in England. It is considered to be the first type style designed specifically for display or jobbing, rather than for book work. The first instance of Fat Face in wood type is found in the first wood type specimen book ever produced: Darius Wells, Letter Cutter 1828. This style was produced by all early wood type manufacturers. The style is derived from the high contrast, thick and thin Modern style of Bodoni and Didot developed only decades previously. The extended variation makes the face even more of a display type and not at all suitable for text. This type of display type was used to compete with the new Lithographic process which allowed for the development of the poster as an artform unto itself. This new digitization by Jim Lyles most closely follows the Wm Page cut. The crisp outlines hold up at the largest point sizes you can imagine. This font contains a full CE character set.

Annlie™ Extra Bold and Annlie Extra Bold Italic are two display faces designed by Fred Lambert in 1966 for the Annlie type family. These two samples from the Annlie family are both fat faces. Fat faces were offshoots of the modern, or Didone, typefaces that were de rigueur during the early 1800s. These fat faces were among the first typefaces to be used solely for advertising purposes. Naturally, they were always used in larger point sizes, in display functions. Annlie could be called an optimization of these old advertising typefaces. With high x-heights, ultra contrast between thick and thin strokes, and perfectly engineered drawing techniques, Annlie is a highly crafted typeface. Give it a spin in your next advertising campaign! Annlie’s fine thin strokes are very graceful in their appearance, and lend a strong, yet soft, feminine feeling to anything they touch.

A French form of Fat Face, derived from the British; matrices survive at Berthold in Berlin.

Gastromond began about five years ago with a question: why are fat faces always based on Didot or Bodoni models? Was there a reason that the stresses of these display faces was always vertical or horizontal and never angled? It was time to find out. Gastromond is meant to blend the Renaissance stylings of the Garamond types with the Victorian outlandishness of the fat faces. The result is an emphatic take on a classic genre. Loaded with swashes and alternates, Gastromond has enough character to go around.

Designed by the swiss Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei, (Haas Type Foundry) Chevalier is a set of shaded capitals and figures, modern face or fat face in design. Ideal for business cards and classical letterheads.

Based on turn-of-the-century advertising type. A condensed, fat-faced display font with a touch of the medieval. The influence of art nouveau is also present in the high-waisted caps and flowing lines, putting the face into the early 20th century.

Working at American Type Founders from a Bruce Foundry recutting, Morris Fuller Benton worked out the dramatics of the English Fat Face, and in 1928 produced Ultra Bodoni, a headline spectacular. Using Benton’s 1933 Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed, Richard Lipton digitized Bodoni FB Bold Condensed, then took compression even further and designed Bodoni FB Bold Compressed, a real technical tour de force; FB 1992

Merrivale is an ideal example of the benefits of keeping ones eyes open- it was inspired by the gilt-finished raised lettering on a late Victorian shopsign in Melbourne, Australia. The family of seven faces include upper and lower case forms, small capitals, all capital forms, and flamboyant display forms. Extensive Opentype features are incorporated. All faces are offered in incised forms inspired by the original lettering as well as in solid black filled forms. Thsee typefaces are wonderful for signage where either a period air or a dignified but legible feel are required. They also lend themselves to other display uses such as posters, book covers and so forth and are ideal for the title lines of certificates.

Grammatik was made in the end of 2004. This typeface is clear and simple hybrid between sans and serif styles, which was so popular late 90s. Use Grammatik as a display face for best results.

Madrone is an Adobe Originals typeface designed by Barbara Lind in 1991. Madrone was digitized from proofs of the woodtype collection in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A fat face roman, Madrone is typical of popular early nineteenth-century styles. Fat face types are characterized by their squatness and extreme letter width. One familiar version of this design is Bodoni Ultra Bold. Madrone is eye-catching for display uses in advertising and packaging.

An example from the vintage lettering book "100 Alphabets Publicitaire" ("100 Advertising Alphabets") provided the inspiration for French Lettering JNL. This stylized Victorian [or Western] type face evokes the era of fanciful lettering design from the late 1800s. Available in both regular and oblique versions.

Poster type faces from the twenties and thirties are enjoying a new wave of popularity. The summary, even rather hard principle of the sign is required for a view from a distance. The information appearing on the poster must be readable even from the opposite pavement. And, as is often the case with monumental type faces, these type faces are legible even in small sizes. The name Bahnhof suggests the hypothetical use of the type face on railway station buildings.

Isabelle is the closest thing to a metal type revival Jim Rimmer ever did. The original metal face was designed and cut in late 1930s Germany, but its propspects were cut short by the arrival of the war. This was one of Jim's favourite faces, most likely because of the refined art deco elements that reminded him of his youthful enthusiasm about everything press-related, and the face's intricately thought balance between calligraphy and typography. Not to mention one of the most beautiful italics ever made. Jim's early 2000s digitization included mathematical corrections to the original metal cut, as well as some functional improvements for digital use. In 2013, during the remastering of the entire Rimmer collection, Isabelle underwent a considerable rethinking/expansion and was rechristened Isabelle Pro. The new revisions include small caps, ligatures, seven types of figures, automatic fractions, extended Latin language support, stylistic alternates that include lowercase serif angle options in the roman and looped ascenders/descenders in the italic, and plenty of extra OpenType features like caps-to-small-caps substitution, case-sensitive positioning, ordinals, and extended class-based kerning. Now each of the Isabelle Pro fonts includes over 680 glyphs. 20% of this font's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

TOMO Pillo! a blocky style fat face with attitude. Bold, heavy and fun! all at the same time! You will only need this font to make your designs stand out fresh!

William Caslon (1692-1766) laid the foundation for English typefounding, when he cut his first roman face in London in 1722. He modeled his designs on late seventeenth-century Dutch types; thus his typefaces are classified as Old Styles. The original Caslon punches have been preserved, enabling a perfect recutting of his faces. Notice the hollow in the apex of A and the two full serifs or beaks in the C. The italic capitals are irregular in their inclination. The Caslon font family is distinctive for use in subheadings or continuous text.

A slightly more refined revival of the Fat Face, as supervised by Chauncey Griffith at Mergenthaler one year after ATF’s Ultra Bodoni.

A slightly more refined revival of the Fat Face, as supervised by Chauncey Griffith at Mergenthaler one year after ATF’s Ultra Bodoni.

Fortuna has some resemblance with handtexted characters based, loosely, on the classic italic. But, like Ad Hoc, Fortuna is drawn on a monitor in every detail. The name is Latin and means fate, luck. The composer Carl Orff was actual at the time when I worked with Fortuna, because he had been born 100 years earlier. Orff's Carmina Burana were being introduced on the radio when I was wondering what to call my most recent creation. The song cycle begins with a song to Fortuna: a fated choice of name. Fortuna was released in 1995.

A random scan from a late nineteenth-century German type specimen book, encountered on the internet, provided the pattern for this surprisingly contemporary face. Although all of the characters are parallel to the baseline, the unusual dimensional treatment tends to give the impression that they slant upward to the right. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets.

Handlettering in an ad from the 1920s for a Chicago engraving company provided the inspiration for this fine, fat, flowing face, full of fun and antique charm. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets.

This in-yer-face kinda face is based on a broad brush font from "The New ABC of Showcard & Ticketwriting" by C. Milne, published in Australia in the late 1930s. Brought to my attention by Ms. Kat Black, and named in honor of Ms. Kat's grannie, to whom the book originally belonged. The Postscript and Truetype versions contain a complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252); in addition, the Opentype version supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages as well.

Gold Fever is a revival of the old classic Caxtonian font originaly designed in the mid to late 1800s. Along with the original engraved shadow version new styles have been created making this decorative font set more complete. The new styles include a solid black, open faced, condensed and fill versions.

The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, or Early Alphabetic) is found in a small corpus of c. 40 inscriptions and fragments, the vast majority from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, dating to the Middle Bronze Age. They are considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC.

The inspiration for AlbertBetenbuch came from a typeface drawn by Albert Dürer and an interpretation of that face in Arthur Baker’s Historic Calligraphic Alphabets (Dover, 1980). It is not a recreation of either. The characteristic common to AlbertBetenbuch and the faces inspiring it is the decorative zig-zag with the upper-case letters. In late 2018 the inside of the shadowed style was separated out. It looks very much like the plain face but its spacing matches the shadowed version. It can be layered with the shadowed version to easily create two-colored letters.

Palatino is the work of Hermann Zapf and became available in the late 1950s from D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt am Main. Zapf optimized Palatino’s design for legibility, producing a typeface which remained legible even on the inferior paper of the post World War II period. Zapf named the font after Giambattista Palatino, a master of scripts from the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Palatino is an Old Face font which proves that classic forms can still be used to create new typefaces.