Maraka is a handwritten font family, drawn with a paint marker on rough paper, then scanned and turned into vector format. Maraka has a lot of alternative letters and is available in three versions: “Regular”, characterized by an unique look obtained by drawing the letters on a rough sheet, "Solid" and "Serif". Maraka is ideal for large headers, straplines and typographic compositions, but it still gives a great dynamic effect when writing wordy paragraphs.

The hand lettered title on the sheet music for "Gee, But I'd Like to Make You Happy" (from the 1930 MGM motion picture "Good News") presented a conundrum. Some of the lettering was a classic Art Deco "thick and thin" design while the others resembled comic book title lettering. Leaning toward the comic book style, the conflicting letters were revised and the finished result became Funny Business JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

A piece of hand lettered sheet music from the era of the "Roaring Twenties" served as a model for Raccoon Coat JNL. It was a time of Prohibition, bathtub gin, flappers and college boys decked out in beanies and raccoon coats. College pennants, ukuleles and "23 Skidoo" were all part of the youth culture during this period; which gave us such dances at the Charleston, the Black Bottom and the Lindy Hop.

The hand-lettered title on a piece of sheet music for 1938's "Don't Be That Way" (as recorded by Benny Goodman) featured squared letters with rounded corners, slight variants in line thickness and interesting "overhangs". Additionally, some letters closed off on one end while others were opened, giving the impression of a slight "maze" effect. This unique song title was enough of an inspiration to be turned into Musical Arrangement JNL.

The 1934 Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler-Joan Blondell movie musical "Dames" gave us the classic song "I Only Have Eyes for You", but the sheet music for the song had the movie title hand lettered in a multi-line Art Deco sans serif design that just begged to be turned into a type font. From these few letters now comes Deco Multiline JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Miss Demeanor has a tendency to create her own rules due to her free-spirited nature. She conforms to every day typographic expectations but she wouldn’t like you to think so. She has unusual yet casual and eye catching shapes and makes the best of any situation. I hope you enjoy her pretty style! My inspiration for Miss Demeanor came from a specimen sheet of an american type style from the early 1930’s.

Let Me Call You Sweetheart was one of the most popular songs of the early 20th Century, and a piece of vintage sheet music for this tune had its title hand lettered in a square, narrow block lettering style. With a few adjustments and adaptations, this led to the creation of Tall and Narrow JNL, a digital version of the type design which is a perfect alternate to the more conventional condensed faces.

Junior Clerk JNL is the plain sans serif version of the lettering found on the cover of the sheet music for 1919's "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise". The song title was originally set in a decorative sans serif with an engraved line adorning each character. This version of the more fanciful design is available as the companion font Legal Eagle JNL. Junior Clerk JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The cover on the sheet music for the 1922 song "If She Comes from Dixie" had the title hand-lettered in an Art Nouveau style with a semi-stencil effect. It's now available as Nouveau Semi Stencil JNL in both regular and oblique versions. The typeface is not considered a "pure" stencil because many of the letters were made solid; lacking the classic stencil "breaks" at key points found in more traditional stencil designs.

In the heyday of "Tin Pan Alley", a song plugger was one whose job it was to bring a publisher's song to the attention of performers, show producers and radio station executives; the forerunner of the promotion man who visited disk jockeys with new record releases in the hopes of getting them played on the air. Song Plugger JNL was based on hand lettering spotted on some late-1920s-early 1930s sheet music.

Front Row JNL is an all-caps reinterpretation of Morris Fuller Benton's 1937 type design "Empire", and is available in both regular and oblique versions. As is often the case when a digital type font is based on a few letter examples found on a printed sample [in this case, the sheet music of the 1946 Guy Lombardo hit "What More Can I Ask For"], the missing characters were drawn from scratch.

Belmont JNL is named for an avenue in the Bronx, New York famous for once being the location of the Belmont Estate, which was the home of the Lorrillard tobacco family. The Art-Deco-era hand lettering from some vintage sheet music is the basis for this type design. During the 1950s a quartet of teenaged Italian-American singers took the street's name for their vocal group, naming themselves Dion and the Belmonts.

The thin, stylish Art Deco slab serif lettering featured on the cover of the 1934 sheet music for “Then I’ll be Tired of You” inspired the digital type face Park West JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. Central Park West has always been the upscale area for affluent New Yorkers, but in the Great Depression years of the 1930s the mystique of the well-to-do held an even stronger significance.

I've always admired the work of Rudolph Koch. Culpepper is what I think Neuland would have looked like if it had been developed with lowercase, small caps and a range of weights. I started work on this series in the late 80’s and, like so many of my ideas, it was shelved when life drew me in another direction. Culpepper is the name of one of the islands in the Galapagos chain.

“The Auto Show” is the title of an early 1900s pieces of sheet music proving that America has had a fascination with cars since the earliest days of the automotive industry. The song sheet’s title was hand lettered in a casual Art Nouveau style which has been re-drawn digitally as Nouveau Auto JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions… and what’s better than a nouveau auto (a new car)?

The cover of the sheet music for the 1931 song "When the Autumn Leaves of Life Begin to Fall" has the song's title hand lettered in a thin monoline Art Deco Style. The song itself was co-written by Buddy G. De Sylva, who would go on to be one of the founders of Capitol Records. Now digitally re-drawn as Autumn Song JNL, the font is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Most of the lettering on a piece of sheet music for a song from the 1921 George M. Cohan musical comedy entitled “The O’Brien Girl” was hand lettered in a playful, casual Art Nouveau design with rounded ends. The characters on that page took on a look reminiscent of cartoon or comic strip wording, and the result is a digital typeface named Cartoon Nouveau JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

After the success of our best-selling Mr Black, we decided to once more use my grandfather’s dry transfer lettering sheets. My grandfather was a Polish military cartographer and he left us some used-up sheets. The letters didn't transfer so well but we liked the way they were damaged. Mr Tiger has upper- and lowercase characters with up to four alternate glyphs. First three variations are only slightly damaged but the fourth one is usually more distorted. All of the glyphs have a very high resolution so they can be used in a large scale and they will still look great. One of the best things in Mr Tiger is the OpenType Contextual Alternates feature. It will automatically set alternate glyphs depending on frequency of appearance of the same character. The script doesn’t throw random glyphs. For example in the word “HIPPOPOTAMUS” you will automatically get three different “P” glyphs and two “O” glyphs. It really works great but of course you can always fine tune it by hand.

Christmas cookies have already slowly crept onto your local supermarket's shelves -- the Linotype Xmas Fonts just can't wait any longer! Ravishingly friendly and universally applicable: Fuenfwerken -- a design studio from Wiesbaden, Germany -- is proud to present its latest Fun Font Family. Bringing variety to the dry Christmas card genre, these fonts can also be used on posters to spread holiday cheer at home. No limits are placed on your creativity here! The family has three different fonts, each with more than 60 symbols inside: Xmas Story includes the whole figure palette necessary for a classical Christmas story. From a cute little Baby Jesus to the Three Wise Men and woolly Aramaic sheep and everything that one needs to add special flair to a letter to grandma, or to set up a Nativity Scene at home for the kids is included. Customers who aren't searching for a biblical font should check out Xmas Essentials. This font contains typical non-denominational end-of-the-year holiday ornaments, such as snowflakes, decorated Christmas trees, nutcrackers, and stars. Last but not least is the Xmas Modern font. Just as global warming poses severe risks to snowmen, this font will make recipients of your holiday and New Year's cards melt. Glyphs such as Santa Claus riding on a Vespa -- complete with iPod -- speed away from normal, stuffy holiday seriousness, and signal that the Fun Generation has arrived! The best choice, of course, is to treat yourself to all three fonts this Christmas. Then you'll be prepared for every situation. Happy Holidays!

Download the full zip as it contains samples and an explanation as well as the font. This is just a small font producing a blank grid for Sudoku puzzles that you have found or generated elsewhere and would like to complete on a sheet of paper; or if someone else has a puzzle they intend to complete later and you'll need a blank page to do the same puzzle yourself without bloodshed. It's simplicity itself to use.

Tourist Spot JNL is the same lettering style as Old Tijuana JNL, but with the squiggly inside lines stripped away. The original design was modeled from the hand lettered title on the cover of the 1939 sheet music for "Class Will Tell" and is available in both regular and oblique versions. Casual and playful in nature, the font can be used by itself or combined with Old Tijuana JNL for any project that promotes festive occasions.

The beautiful Art Deco monoline pen lettering on the cover of a 1940s piece of sheet music inspired Central Park JNL. The 1940s was an era when couples took romantic walks along the pathways of Manhattan's Central Park or rode around it in hansom cabs. Big bands played at the major clubs and ballrooms and "uptown" meant the well-to-do. Men dressed in their tuxedos and top hats and the ladies were in their jewels and evening gowns.

A vintage piece of sheet music for "Waitin' at the Gate for Katy" (from the 1934 movie "Bottoms Up") provided the hand-lettered, Western-influenced lettering which is now available as Badlands JNL. Some of the characters originally had overly-thick vertical strokes which stood out from the rest of the letters, so they were "standardized" in order to provide a more aesthetically pleasing overall design. Available in both regular and oblique versions to fit your design needs.

Sheet music for the title song from the 1933 Jean Harlow-Clark Gable film "Hold Your Man" has the movie title hand lettered in a dual line sans serif with Art Deco influences. This is now available as Dual Line Deco, and is available in both regular and oblique versions. The song itself was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, whose vast catalog of musical compositions was tapped for the 1952 musical classic "Singing in the Rain".

Old Tijuana JNL was modeled from the hand lettered title on the cover of the 1939 sheet music for "Class Will Tell" and is available in both regular and oblique versions. Casual, playful and reminiscent of the "serape" style of pseudo-Mexican lettering found on ad designs of the 1930s and 1940s, the type face isn't just for South of the Border themes. Use it for any festive occasion and the design will blend in well.

For decades, the Greenwich Village area of New York was a home for artists, poets, writers and free-thinkers of their time who were labeled "Bohemians" because of their non-conformist approach to life and the arts. Greenwich Village JNL is an Art Nouveau-influenced typeface with a Bohemian approach in its double crossbars on the A and H; all the while being a nice example of hand lettering found on a vintage piece of sheet music.

The hand lettered title found on the 1924 sheet music for the tango “Sentimiento Gaucho” (“Sentimental Gaucho”) offered a different take on the thick-and-thin lettering that permeated the late 1920s through the Art Deco age. A ‘slash’ or ‘swipe’ is cut through the characters (similar to “Directa JNL” – another take on this type of design). Last Tango JNL is the digital recreation of this novelty lettering and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

A lament is a sad song, and the music of the cowboys of the Old West had their fair share of them. However, a vintage piece of sheet music from the early part of the 20th century with the title "The Dying Cowboy" brought at least one positive trait to its mournful song. The title lettering was drawn in a fashion that emulated lettering made with quick strokes of a paintbrush, and became the inspiration for Cowboy Lament JNL.

Early 1900s songwriters had a penchant for devising lengthy titles for their compositions. A perfect example from 1909, "It Is Hard to Kiss Your Sweetheart When the Last Kiss Means 'Good Bye'" is a whopping fourteen words long. The sheet music for this piece has a hand lettered, Art Nouveau sans serif design which became the working model for La Vie Nouveau JNL [which translates to "the new life"], and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

“I Don't like No Cheap Man” is a piece of early 1900s sheet music featuring its title hand lettered in a condensed slab serif design. The influences of the Art Nouveau era are clearly found in the many eccentric character shapes within the various letters of the original artwork. Recreated in digital type, Tightwad JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions – and its font name is a variant of the “Cheap Man” portion of the song’s title.

Sheet music from the 1921 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies provided the blueprint for this sparkly, sprightly font. Upper and lowercase characters are identical, with the exception of the letter s, which offers a version of the letter with a big caboose rather than an overbite. Named for David Bowie’s 1972 breakthrough album. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

A handwritten ”font for technicians“ from ca. 1900. Very geometrical, rigid forms borrowed from the typical characteristics of Jugendstil / Art Nouveau. This script is found in a magazine from the Otto Maier publishing house, Ravensburg, which was issued sometime in the years shortly before WWI. The magazine is entitled ”Schriften-Sammlung für Techniker: Verkleinerte Schriften der wichtigsten Alphabete“ (Collection of scripts for technical specialists: reduced scripts of the most significant alphabets) and published by Karl O. Maier. The original copy, produced by means of a galvanized plate, is just 7 centimeters wide. It served as the model for technical professions in which, at that time, the captions of drawings were still done by hand. The characters have been scanned, digitized and greatly magnified. Special attention was given to ensure the ”uneven“ edges, typical of handwritten script, remained effectively noticeable even in the digitized form. As a result, this ”technical“ font retains a handmade touch. Especially worthy of note are the Jugendstil forms characteristic at the turn of the19th century. In comparison, many alleged ”ultramodern“ font types of today suddenly look quite old-fashioned. Maier’s Nr. 21 Pro is suitable for all European languages. It includes ”Latin Extended-A,“ for Central and Eastern Europe incl. Turkish, and even Cyrillic and Greek, too. The font includes several stylistic alternates as well as a number of ligatures.

Phosphate Pro is an all-caps sans serif font family with an inline weight, and was created by Steve Jackaman (ITF) and Ashley Muir in 2010. The original Phosphate was published by International TypeFounders, and the family was based on the ‘Phosphor’ typeface created by Jakob Erbar for Ludwig and Mayer, circa 1922-30. Jackaman created a condensed variant, 'Phosphate Condensed Pro,' in 2017. Phosphate Pro has incredible presence, and its power shines in display format. Apple, who is notoriously selective about their software choices, included Phosphate Pro in the system fonts for Apple’s OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

The light and the bold. The thick and the thin. Laverne and the Shirley. Peanut Butter and the Jelly. Hoban is about contrast. Hoban wants to be noticed, but only after a second glance. A friend of a friend to the didones, it has smaller, tapering serifs, slightly calligraphic traits, and spindly little terminals that go where they please. It’s a headline face. Period. Set it big and bold. Or light and airy. But preferably next to something with flair. Cuff links, canapés, or corvettes–it’s up to you. Distinct ligatures, ornaments, and swashy alternates provide plenty of character to tailor your style.

The 1913 sheet music for "There's A Girl in the Heart of Maryland (with a Heart That Belongs to Me)" may have had no shortage of words in the title - fifteen to be exact, but it also offered some nice hand lettering in the Art Nouveau style. Maryland JNL is a condensed typeface with an unusual twist. The "S" and "G" both have spurs on them, which is reminiscent of the preceding Victorian period and the popular spurred Tuscan alphabets of the time.

Inky Fingers… Well, the name says it all! This rather obese font was made by hand (literally) using my index finger, some sheets of paper and a lot of Chinese ink. As the eco-paper absorbed quite a lot of ink, I had to do a second ink-run! Inky Fingers is a very legible typeface, ideal for headlines, books and posters. It comes with Babylonian language support - including the Schwa/schwa glyphs for the Azeri speaking crowd. Ain't I nice?

The handmade title on the cover for the 1939 edition of “A Wand’ring Minstrel” [from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado”] was rendered with a round nib lettering pen in an Art Deco style. This type design is now available as Cover Letter JNL in both regular and oblique versions. However, the font’s name is a bit of a pun, as it has nothing to do with cover letters, but rather the lettering found on the cover of the sheet music.

Playing with old rub-on letters led to this alphabet. On the Letraset sheets (the older ones still remember...) there were always letters left over that were never or rarely used. I sometimes let interns play with it. To explain, I first rubbed an example myself. Two y's from a Helvetica made a pretty shape. Looking closely, you see a contoured, italic N. I developed the HGB Ypsilon font from this N. A purely decorative typeface – it could be interesting for some logo.

Sheet music for the 1910 composition "Good-By Betty Brown" has its title hand lettered in a thick and thin, condensed sans serif design reminiscent of lettering found in later comic strips and books of the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles, Funny Papers JNL gets its name from the slang reference Americans of the early 20th Century gave the Sunday comics pages in their local newspapers, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.