KgStuttgart1930 -- Kunstgewerbeschule Stuttgart 1930 -- is based on a printed sample of a font designed in 1930 at the Stuttgart School of Applied Arts. Found in the book ABZ, more alphabets and other signs by J. Rothenstein and M. Goodings. I recreated the grid and kept some awkward letters of this bauhaus-era inspired design. I created the missing glyphs and added alternate versions of already existing ones.

Spur Wide JNL was modeled from an example of hand lettering from the antique French alphabet book L'Art du Tracé Rationnel de la Lettre. Heavy Roman style letters with spurs (often referred to as Latin) were most popular with sign painters and show card writers in the early part of the 20th century. Spur Wide JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Prismatiq JNL was modeled from lettering found in a French alphabet book from the turn of the last century - the type sample appearing online at an image sharing site. All of the imperfections of hand-lettering were left intact. This is a limited character set comprising A-Z, 1-0, basic punctuation, forward slash and dollar and cents signs, and is best used in large headline applications.

Police JNL was modeled from one of the many fonts created by the late Alf Becker exclusively for Signs of the Times magazine during the 1930s through the 1950s. This was a bit of a difficult design to translate into a digital font file, because the individual characters did not follow a formal structure as to the width and length of the cast shadows or the letter shapes—such is the way of the hand-lettered alphabet. Special thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Publications (and curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati) for providing the archival material to work from in creating this font. Police JNL has a limited character set. The basic A-Z character is on the upper and lower case keys, along with numbers, some punctuation and the dollar and cents signs.

Painting Stencil JNL was modeled in part from a vintage set of 8 inch Gothic stencils. Alphabets of this size were generally referred to as painting stencils because each letter could be painted individually in marking signs, streets or buildings, where the classic 'lettering guide' type of stencils were used for smaller projects and had alignment holes for accurate letter spacing as well as multiples letters per page.

PiS Koernig is inspired by handwritten alphabets from Max Körner's book „Das Neue Schriftenbuch“ from 1949 featuring bold and decorative display type for use in sign painting and advertising. It features clean and readable glyphs as well as quirky deco alternate letters in Max Körner's original style to add some 1950ies flavour to your projects. Be sure to use E and F caps + alternates for some labyrinth-esque patterns!

If you take the South Shore Line from Chicago to South Bend, your train will pass though the small community of Beverly Shores, Indiana. The beautifully restored and highly colorful “Beverly Shores” train station sign not far from the Lake Michigan beach is the source of inspiration for this connecting script typeface. The sign’s existing ten letters have now been extended to include the entire alphabet. This old-fashioned depot letterstyle is much in the spirit of such faces as Fulton Sign and Inserat Cursive. Ascenders and descenders have been lengthened and capitals are now much larger. Alternate lowercase swashes, capitals, and small figures have been included for your convenience. And custom uphill words such as “The,” “for,” and “to” have been added for more novelty and spark in headline settings. Beverly Shores Script with Alternates is also available in the OpenType Std format. Some new characters including old style figures have been added to this OpenType version. Advanced features currently work in Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress 7. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades. All aboard for Beverly Shores!

Eckhardt Poster Text JNL continues Jeff Levine's series of sign painter-oriented fonts, named in honor of his good friend Albert Eckhardt, Jr. (who ran Allied signs in Miami, Florida from 1959 until his passing). Sign painters are the true heroes of lettering, for they make the alphabet and style fit the job. Printers and layout artists were constricted by metal and wood type; that is until photo lettering, then digital type opened up unexplored territories in design possibilities. There is a unique charm (and nowadays pretty much a lost art) to hand-lettering word copy in a way that draws the eye like an arrow to a target. Even a simple sanserif such as Eckhardt Poster Text JNL can have the effect of that hand lettering when applied to posters and pages with plenty of white space and matching type designs of the period.

Patriotica JNL was inspired by some hand lettering designed by the late Alf Becker for Signs of the Times® magazine. The alphabet was modified and the character set extended in this digital version. Special thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Publications, Inc. and the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati for providing a copy of the original lettering for use as a work model. Patriotica JNL is available as a complete font or in a set of two layers (stars layer and stripes layer) for creating two-color graphics. As always, keep in mind that there are some slight variations between drawing programs, so some adjustments may need to be made in the alignment of the layers.

Kesmod is a clean display typeface that excels in urban posters, music covers, clothing print design, impactful headlines, large page headers, billboards, signs, bold headlines, modern acid typography, Brutal Bold design, and much more. This modular Sans Serif typeface features 12 styles spanning from delicate thin to bold black, which really can help in modern experimental design. You will receive: - 12+1 styles - including Uppercase Alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and common additional glyphs.

The font has a pronounced decorative effect and is suitable for the gaming, publishing and film industry. The Cyrillic alphabet conveys the spirit and atmosphere of Soviet constructivism. It is well suited for names of Soviet (or pseudo-Soviet) trademarks, large headings, signs, giant letter structures, etc. The Latin part is not tied to the Soviet period and can be applied in a wider range. Sharp angles and unnatural proportions create dynamics, strength and heaviness.

Samuel Welo was a sign painter who had published in the 1920s and again in 1960 his “Studio Handbook – Letter and Design for Artists and Advertisers”, prolifically hand lettering all of the type style examples within the pages of the publication. In 1930 Welo also published “Lettering - Practical and Foreign”. From this book comes a thick-and-thin hand lettered Art Deco alphabet – now available digitally as Sightseeing Tour JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Mandarin font first appeared with the Type Founders of Chicago and is an interpretation of artistically drawn Asian brush calligraphy. The stylized Asian atmosphere is not created only by the forms of the figures but also by the very name of the typeface. A mandarin was a high official of the ancient Chinese empire. Alphabets like Mandarin font are often used for the menus, signs and advertisements of Asian restaurants as well as for businesses with Asian products.

Reliant is a free interpretation of the classic design from fonts "BernhardSchoenschrift", originally designed by Lucien Bernhard and "Liberty", designed by W.T. Sniffin for ATF in 1927, following the original designs from Lucien Bernhard. This enhanced OpenType version has complete sets in Greek and Latin alphabet with Central European, Vietnamese, Baltic and Turkish complete resources with all diacritic signs and punctuation marks plus extra characters belonging this ranges. A Cyrillic alphabet completes the font, and we thanks to Dmitry Greshnev from Green Type. He help us to fix our original Cyrillic alphabet to the Cyrillic readers. We added a extensive set of ligatures (stylistic and contextual alternates plus discretionary ligatures) providing a lot of letterform variations that make your design really special, plus swashes and tails ornaments (to artistic increase any letter of this font) more fractions and number ligatures (a strange idea from Iza W). Over 800 glyphs which you have total access using software such as InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXpress and others.

Propaganda in a poodle skirt? Another gem gleaned from Schrifti Alphabeti, a book of Cyrillic alphabets published in Kiev (now Ukraine, then USSR) in 1979. Flouncy, bouncy, perky and quirky, this typeface will add sass and charm to any project it graces. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

In 1932, Xanti Schawinsky (1904?1979) designed an alphabet that combines two styles: a neo-classic stroke contrast paired with characteristics of stencil lettering. This mix is a child of its time and seems to reflect the Swiss and Italian biography of Schawinski. Luca Pellegrini took on the modern look and re-drew the letterforms, interrupted by subtle spaces where thick and thin strokes meet. Although Schawinsky had already designed a complete alphabet and figures in the early 1930s, Pellegrini took the character set to another level, adding currency signs, mathematical symbols and all kinds of punctuation ? anything needed to set more than just headlines. Xants is a blend of Swiss elegance and exclusiveness with Italian charm and imperfection, a combination that never gets old.

Artemis Sans is the beautiful Greek sister of Arthur Sans. Enjoy the unique grace of the eternal Greek capitals alphabet in a new fashion! For any mixed-language setting, Artemis Sans matches the proportions of Arthus Sans Semibold or Arthur Cabinet Tabac, it harmonizes perfectly with any other font of the Arthur series. Artemis Sans gives a wonderful breeze of elegance to book covers, title pages, headlines, business cards, posters, menus or labels. Both fonts contain the OY-ligature, the Kai-sign in two forms, and a small range of ornaments. For more embellishments please have a look at the stunning Arthur Ornaments. • Please note that Artemis Sans is a CAPITALS-only product! The basic English alphabet is also included in both fonts.

Outside Voice is a handwritten, all-caps typeface, created as an homage to the robust history of handwritten protest signs. It's a beautiful display font for a huge range of projects, from poster art to holiday cards. With contextual alternates enabled, this font will automatically cycle through three sets of handwritten alphabets as you type. The result is type that looks as imperfect and handmade as a digital font can get. This makes Outside Voice a wonderful choice for pairing with hand-drawn illustrations. Consider varying the size, slant, and/or color of each line in your layouts. These adjustments make Outside Voice look even more handmade and organic, which is great for fun designs like posters and quotes. This typeface is quirky and ligature-rich, with over 600 glyphs and icons. It supports Latin and Modern Greek alphabets, and includes all European language diacritical markings. It includes a set of decorated word ligatures comprised of common protest words like 'peace,' 'vote', and 'yes!'. Additionally, you'll get a full set of common protest icons, such as a raised fist, planet, dove, and peace sign.

Hinton is a modern, clean text font, including 840+ characters, many Opentype features, all European & Slavic symbols. It is calm, orderly and a bit perky. Hinton has a lightweight and pleasant design, so it fits well and easy to read. Its characters are simultaneously austere and elegant, and have their own flavor. Hinton includes all European and Slavic alphabets, Euro and other 8 signs of currencies. In addition to basic Latin and Russian there are German, Dutch, Spain, French, Romanian, Turkish, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Baltic, Scandinavian, Icelandic and others alphabets. Opentype features: stylistic alternates, manual kerning, standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, small capitals, capitals to small caps, case, oldstyles numerals, tubular numerals, localized forms, stylistic set, historical forms, fractions, ordinals, numerators, denominators, slashed zero and others.

Storefront is what the prolific and talented American sign painters of the 1920s and 1930s would have created if they had access to the advanced lettering and type technologies we have today. Rooted in an incomplete Alf Becker alphabet sample, Storefront is my usual overdose on alternates and swashes, my eternal attempt at giving typesetting that ever-elusive handmade impression. Though the main shapes, especially the majuscules, are almost a standard recitation of the natural evolution of nineteenth century scripts, the additional variants available within the font provide a leap in time to what sign makers and packagers are doing today. I can honestly say that Storefront’s influences are probably less historic and more in line with my recent travels and frequent supermarket visits. It’s difficult to avoid current visual culture when you're constantly bombarded with it. Not that I try. I certainly welcome the overflow. I'm probably addicted to it by now. With a very cool aesthetic, plenty of alternates and swashes, extended Latin language support, Storefront is over a thousand glyphs for your branding, packaging, and sign making pleasure.

Vitrines is a digital and extended version of a charming alphabet featured in a 1913 book devoted to window signs and show cards. This version was carefully developed to preserve the original hand lettered look and feel. It includes a bold weight and a set of pattern tiles to adorn your compositions. A note about the pattern font: in order to create even patterns, be sure to set the line spacing the same size as the font and set no spaces before or after paragraphs.

Stencil™ was designed by Gerry Powell for American Type Founders in 1938. It's a faithful imitation of a stenciled alphabet, much like those used on boxes and crates, with rounded edges and thick main strokes. The font is composed of capital letters and figures; there is no lowercase. Use Stencil™ for graphic designs that call for a rough-and-ready look, a military look, or even to create real stencils for signs and marking boxes or luggage. Alexei Chekulaev made a Cyrillic version of Stencil™ in 1997.

Nvma is based on Roman letterforms which appeared during the period from the earliest extant examples in the sixth or seventh century BC until the end of the third century BC. For Nvma the J, U and W had to be fantasies as they did not exist until much later, similar to the G, numerals and other non-alphabetic signs in the font. Thus not all of the archaic forms are represented in Nvma. Nvma was designed to work with Magma, as it matches the weights and heights for Magma Thin and Magma Titling Thin.

Bayoneta is not your usual handcut alphabet, though it can seem so. It can also seem like carefully constructed lettering inspired by Polynesian cultures. By bridging that gap between knife-wielding kitsch and studied display lettering, Bayoneta offers quite a various range of theme possibilities. Its clear and attractive shapes can provide the eye-catching spontaneity on a book cover, the expressive shout on a skateboard or a muscle shirt, the mouth-watering brand on a protein bar package, or the main notice on a theme park ride sign.

Stenzilla is a stencil font based on a rounded sans serif, a careful design, with cuts on the same diagonal axis for the curved strokes and elegant slight curves on the oblique strokes. Useful for branding, highlighted paragraphs, signs, headlines, or reading text. The design incorporates characters from the Cyrillic alphabet, special characters, and characters with diacritical marks. It has the versatility of a sans serif that allows it to be used in a wide variety of designs and styles along with the cut-stroke grace of a stencil font.

Just like the M.C. Escher impossible figures and optical illusions, "Denedo" is a font that is impossible to construct in three dimensions because it only exists as a drawing. This font is based on the "0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9" characters of one of the alphabets published by Nedo Mion Ferrario in the "Letromaquia" exhibition that was shown in Caracas, Venezuela in the 70's. The reason why I chose to restore and complete this font is that unique and exceptional personality that each word acquires when it is written with this alphabet. Denedo is a typographic family in three styles: Denedo 1A, 1B and 1C. When mixing them in big sizes you will emphasize the balance and incongruity of its shapes, providing originality and a unique identity to every word. All of the 3 variations include a complete character set with the lower and upper case letters, numbers, accents, diacritic signs, punctuation and monetary signs. All the fonts included in this family are available in Open Type format and are perfectly compatible with Mac and PC. I want to express my sincere gratitude to all my friends at Typophile who supported and motivated me during the final stages in the development of this font.

Quiroga Serif began in 2007 with the name Quadratta Serif. This typography was designed for continuous text, legible at medium and small sizes, with great saving of space, optimized for 6, 8, 10 and 12 points. The morphology is a mix between tradition and innovation; it has a vertical axis, thick serifs, tall x-height, light modulation and a lot of internal space between letters: key to improve legibility at small sizes. Formally, my idea was to make a serif type that had a unique color, this is visible due to the light modulation. This is also complemented with the incorporation of not common, alternative signs. Some parts of the letters that are usually curb or diagonal where made horizontal (for example: a, q, p, etc.), this makes the eye of each character to be wide and unique. The serifs (wedge type) suffered diverse variations during the process. At the begining they where thicker and ended vertically, but this caused a great deal of printing errors. And so we decided to modify them by giving them an angle to avoid visible errors in medium and small sizes. The ch, and ll ligatures where rescued because they are a part of our current spanish alphabet. The historic ligatures and stylistic alternates give different options to users who want different alternatives within a text. The accentuation signs were composed in a middle line above all signs to avoid visual shock. We also gave plenty of importance to small caps numbers, mathematical signs and currency signs so that the could interact well.

I was inspired by the letters of the mythical “Ideales” tobacco package, designed in 1936 in Barcelona by Carlos Vives, director of the designers studio of the Rieusset graphical industry. We have also studied other geometrical models from the 1920s, to be highlighted among them the alphabet drawn by Cornelis André Vlaanderen at Amsterdam in 1928, which would have been very probably the inspiration for the famous tobacco package. Eutopia has been born with the aim to be useful for the current graphic communications. For that purpose almost 400 glyphs have been designed and more than 2200 kerning pairs have been defined. The multiple diacritic signs have been prepared to allow a multilingual use in most of the languages based on Latin alphabet. The OpenType features have been used to get alternate characters of “A” and “g”, and also ligatures, lowercase numbers and other typographic refinements.

In the days before vinyl sign lettering overran the landscape, talented neighborhood sign painters and show card writers made attractive displays for local merchants. Toucan Tango JNL is Jeff Levine's interpretation of a sign painter's sans serif letter with a distinctive inline.

Buffet Script is based on fantastic calligraphy by Alf Becker, arguably the greatest American sign lettering artist of all time. The Alf Becker series of nameless alphabets published by Sign of the Times magazine in 1941 has attracted letter digitizers for a few years now, so it’s really a wonder that a few of those alphabets are still in the non-digital realm. It is understandable, though, that the basis for Buffet Script was not digitally attempted until now. The page presenting this alphabet shows a jungle of letters running into each others and swashes intertwining. The massive amount of work involved in digitizing such lettering, where scanning is nowhere near being an option, is quite obvious at a mere glance. If anyone was going to commit this particular alphabet to a digital form, it would have to be redrawn stroke by stroke and curve by curve on the computer. And don't we love a challenge! But seriously, the challenge was not the main attraction. In a way, the Becker approach to lettering is so far from digital that the imagination is almost forced to work out possibilities and letter combinations to solve problems presented by the scant showings in that magazine. After a few imaginative visualizations, the digital potential becomes clear in the mind, and the eye and hand follow. The result with Whomp (another Alf Becker-inspired work) was an enormous font with a lot of alternates and ligatures. With Buffet Script the imaginative process was no different, but the result particularly shines here, because this is some of the most fascinating flowing calligraphy ever seen. Calligraphy is where the accountability of all the little extra touches, such as alternates and swashes and ligatures, is raised to a higher level than in most other type categories. Buffet Script’s OpenType programming contains discretionary ligatures, stylistic and contextual alternates, interacting with each other to allow the composition of just the right word or sentence. This font is best used where lush elegance is one of the design’s requirements.

Paestum is a Latin typeface inspired by Greek inscriptions of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. Its name comes, suitably, from the Latin name for Poseidonia, a former Greek city south of Naples whose two remaining Doric temples have been on antiquities tours since at least the 1700s. Others have scanned this terrain before, of course, but earlier designs failed to supply a lower case. Although Paestum includes complete upper- and lowercase alphabets, diacritics, numerals, and essential punctuation, it does not have many unhistorical glyphs -- such as currency symbols and the @ sign. Paestum comes with three weights: light, medium, and heavy.

The type family in four basic styles was designed in ParaType (ParaGraph) in 1992 by Tagir Safayev. Based on Frutiger, of Mergenthaler Linotype, 1976 by Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger font was originally designed for use on signs at the new Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy. The straightforward sans serif shapes are suited well for both text and display setting. Six additional styles were added in 1998-2000. Multilingual versions of 6 styles (Light, Demi and Extrabold) include Armenian alphabet designed by Manvel Shmavonyan in 1997. Two condensed Cyrillic styles (Demi Condensed and Bold Condensed) designed by Manvel Shmavonyan in 2005.

Cottonwood is a group effort of the typeface artists K.B. Chansler, B. Lind and J. Redick and displays the unmistakable look of the Wild West. It is stylistically modelled on the typefaces used in advertisements and signage toward the end of the 19th century. Typical for these capital alphabets are the split serifs which emphasize the markedly decorative character. Cottonwood is a kind of homage to the Western typefaces (woodtypes) which became popular through their use on Wanted signs in Western films. Cottonwood is best used sparingly in headlines to best emphasize its decorative, 'wild' character.

Etruscania font is base on Anchient Etruscan Alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet is an Ancient Italian alphabet used by the Etruscans, an ancient civilization of the central and northern lands, to write their language, from around 700 BC to around 100 AD. The Etruscan alphabet took inspiration from the Phoenician alphabet. The earliest known Etruscan abecedarium inscribed on an ivory wax tablet frame, measuring 8.8x5 cm, was found at Marsiliana near Grosseto, Tuscany in Italy. It dates from around 700 BC.

Silly Behavior JNL is based on a hand lettered alphabet found within the pages of the vintage lettering book “100 Alphabets Publicitaires” (100 Advertising Alphabets). The fun, haphazard arrangement of the letters and numbers convey a casual approach to titling.

Many years ago I studied American Sign Language in an effort to better communicate with some friends of mine within the deaf community. I found ASL to be a beautifully expressive language from a vibrant and active culture. Out of that attempt came this stylized depiction of the manual alphabet used in finger-spelling. Until recently it had only existed in analog form, born of pen and ink on paper. So now I'm glad to say it’s turned digital. Typing a period (.) will reveal the sign for “I Love You” (a combination of the letters I, L and Y), which fits nicely within the shape of a heart. Holding down the shift key while again typing period (greater symbol) will reveal the heart in its filled-in form, which can serve as an underlay. Use these in an application that supports layering in order to create different color combinations. There’s a stylistic alternate letter “S” and an “OO” ligature which can be accessed in OpenType-savvy apps.

The late-19th-century Prussian-American printer and publisher Louis Prang, the “father of the American Christmas card”, was well-known for his efforts to improve art education in the United States. He published many instructional books and even founded a training school for art teachers. One of the books he published included a series of alphabets for sign painters, lithographers, illuminators, architects and civil engineers. There was nothing truly original there — in the book’s preface, Prang says that the alphabets were “based on foreign forms and adapted for American taste”. The one alphabet that caught my attention in that book was one simply called “Italic”. It’s a high- contrast modern, a Didone really, but with an interesting little twist: the lowercase is almost entirely connected, which makes for an interesting mix of modern typography and classic calligraphy. That stuff is right up my alley now. Whenever my eyes happen on a modern, it’s easy, even almost impulsive for me to envision swashes coming out of serifs and terminals. The caps melt and the minuscules dance with them. And so I brought my vision to life. Prangs is an italic set of three weights, each containing more than 1400 glyphs with plenty of OpenType features and Latin language support. This set celebrates the convergence of three centuries of fancy display alphabets. These fonts should work wherever moderns are used to elevate and scripts are used to appeal — namely today’s branding, packaging and glossy publications.

Frank H. Atkinson was a popular Art Nouveau sign painter in Chicago, Illinois. He designed signs for the Cadillac Motor Car Co., Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the department store Marshall Field. Oddly enough, he even designed signs for other sign painters. In 1908 he published a book, Sign Painting, which sold well. French Plug, a bold, rounded, all-cap design in an American Art Nouveau style from that book. It has a relaxed, easy-going informality that is useful for ads and flyers. It also would have fit very nicely with many French posters of the period.

Whoever knew the Red Menace could be such fun? This bold and bouncy face is based on a Cyrillic alphabet presented in the book Schrifti Alphabeti, published in the Soviet Union in 1979. It rollicks and frolicks, and might even fetch your slippers. Special thanks to Charles Barsotti for permission to use The Pup to promote this doggone-good product. 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.