Inspired by the hand lettered phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” in a 1923 promotional blurb for Speedball lettering pens, Pen Nib Western JNL recreates the decorative style of this vintage artistic gem in both regular and oblique versions.

An image of a vintage, hand-cut metal stencil with just a set of bold numerals inspired the design of Bold Metal Stencil JNL. The typeface is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Wood Type Grotesk JNL was re-drawn from a set of vintage wood type purchased from a closed rubber stamp shop. Although the style of lettering is referred to in old type catalogs as a "grotesk" face, in truth the lettering has charm and effectively gets the printed point across to the reader. This typeface is available in both regular and oblique versions.

A few scant examples of die cut gummed letters (R, C, Y and &) provided the design inspiration for Adhesive Serif Letters JNL. Influenced by the Caslon style, this typeface offers clean, legible titling. The sample letters were once manufactured by the Tablet and Ticket Company of Chicago and sold under their brand name of Willson's [named for the founder of the company]. Gummed letter sets were available in a variety of styles and sizes for various sign, merchandising and marking needs.

Sitting in a diner and looking upon a wall full of nostalgia, there hangs a picture of another older diner in some Northern city. The lettering from it's rooftop sign almost screams "Make a font out of this!"... so Jeff Levine did... "Hash and Beans JNL".

Another collection of various stock cuts, cartoons, embellishments, sales helpers, decorations and borders comprise Print Shop Sorts JNL, with all of the images re-drawn from vintage sources.

Online auctions continue to be a surprising wealth of font design inspiration. In this instance, a number of silk embroidered Art Deco initials inside inverted triangles inspired Deco Pennant Initials JNL. The uppercase version is white lettering on a black background – similar to the originals. On the lowercase keys is a set of initials that are black on white with a black border. Since the inverted triangles resemble pennants, there’s a solid black blank on the left parenthesis key and a outlined blank one on the right parenthesis key. In this way, the initials could be used for monograms or interspersed with the blanks to form short banner messages.

A beautiful and stylish pen lettered alphabet appears within the pages of the 1921 publication “How to Write Show Cards” and its Art Nouveau stylings made it a perfect candidate for a digital revival. Pleasant Show Card JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Based on a vintage set of kitchen labels, Jams and Jellies JNL is a font containing 52 of the most common names for jams, jellies and preserves as well as a blank label for creating your own flavor choices. Note: While this font may be used in many commercial advertising applications, any manufacture for retail sale of a complete set (or portion thereof) of these labels requires a special license from the font's author.

Wood Condensed Grotesk JNL is a more condensed version of the type style found in Wood Type Grotesk JNL. The font was a popular sans used for large posters or broadsheets as well as newspaper titles where more copy needed to be fit into limited space.

Take a classic hand lettered Art Deco alphabet, add in a treatment of dual straight vertical lines and the resulting typeface is Double Line Deco JNL.

Fine and Dandy JNL comes from the hand lettered title of the 1929 movie "Isle of Escape"; found on the sheet music for its theme song "My Kalua Rose". An engraved and fancy Roman, the style combines elements of Western, Art Nouveau and Art Deco into one attractive type design; available in both regular and oblique versions.

Bold Display Sans JNL is loosely based on one of the classic alphabets found within a Speedball Lettering Textbook of the 1940s; itself called "Bold Display". The original featured a stippled texture and inline curves placed in random patterns throughout the letters. This more simplified, all-caps version is for titling requirements where a strong, yet casual design is needed.

A set of transfer patterns for sewing decorative monogram initials on clothing was manufactured by Women's Day magazine circa the 1940s. Designed by renowned Copenhagen-born industrial artist and letterer Gustav Boerge Jensen [April 8, 1898 - June 27, 1954], these initials have been redrawn into a digital font entitled Danish Script Initials JNL. Large initials are on the uppercase A-Z keys, while smaller initials are on the lower case a-z keys and are centered to the larger cap height. An ornament is provided on the asterisk key, and can be placed between the small initials and the larger initial for decorative effect.

Narrow Roman Stencil JNL was modeled from a vintage brass sign for identification of a ballroom.

“One Hundred Alphabets for the Show Card Writer” was published in 1919 to afford sign artists the ability to create signs and show cards in then-contemporary lettering styles. One such alphabet was big, bold and representative of the Art Nouveau stylings popular in the early part of the 20th Century. Most likely it was applied to store sales and public events that were casual and informal, for its letter forms are free of any constraints. This design is now available as Fun Time Nouveau JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Antique Stencil Borders JNL collects twenty-six vintage border designs from various sources for complementing copy set in stencil lettering or in stand-alone decorative projects. NOTE: The purchase of this font does NOT include license to replicate the designs as commercial products for resale. To do so, a Derivative Products License must be obtained by contacting Jeff Levine. Contact information is found within the End User License Agreement.

Lettering found on the cover of the 1923 song "I Love Me (I'm Wild About Myself)" can take on various graphical possibilities. Although its design is Art Nouveau in concept, it is somewhat reminiscent of the "bubble letters" most school kids used to doodle on notebook and portfolio covers; yet the lettering style also evokes the 1960s-70s Hippie movement. As a sidebar, a couple of lines from the song's lyrics were used by Jeff Levine's late mother to chastise him as a youth when he got "a little too full of himself". The lyrics were: "I love me! I love me! I'm wild about myself! I love me! I love me! My picture's on the shelf!"

A couple of pieces of sheet music from France [circa 1925] offered the inspiration for Chanson De Paris JNL (Song of Paris), which is available in both regular and oblique versions. This hand lettered Art Nouveau style features a unique take on thick-and-thin lettering which foreshadows the Art Deco typefaces to come during the 1930s.

The 1912 publication "Essentials of Lettering" has an example of a hand lettered, condensed spurred serif design called "Compressed Roman". This is now available digitally as New Thin Roman JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

At first glance, Handbills and Posters JNL bears a strong resemblance to Classroom JNL. True, they both share the visual qualities that are based on Franklin Bold Condensed, but this is where the similarity ends. Handbills and Posters JNL is a refined re-draw of the classic design, based largely on vintage typographic examples. There are also some character variances. Classroom JNL is a rougher alphabet with varying curves and lines, and resembles such letters traced and cut out of construction paper for a bulletin board display at school.

Do It Yourself JNL was modeled after self-adhesive vinyl letters and numbers manufactured by Duro Art Industries of Chicago - formerly the Duro Decal Company. The hand-drawn look of the original lettering was retained by Jeff Levine to stay true to the design, and the rectangles that border each glyph represent the pieces of self-adhesive vinyl onto which the characters were silk screened. Limited character set.

French Stencil Moderne JNL is modeled from an alphabet found in the 1930s publication "100 Alphabets Publicitaires" by M. Moullet, and is available in both regular and oblique versions. Strongly resembling the stencil motif of Futura Black, this French stencil alphabet has enough variations to give it a unique design flavor all its own.

The sheet music cover of Lew Brown and Albert Von Tilzer's 1917 wartime song "Au Revoir, But Not Goodbye (Soldier Boy)" had its title hand-lettered in a condensed sans serif design with the influence of Art Nouveau styling. This has now been re-drawn digitally as See You Later JNL.

Playing around with a previous design, Jeff Levine came up with Cut Paper Stencil JNL, a typeface with both an Art Deco flair and the look of letters made from cut paper.

A makeup ad in the December, 1937 issue of Modern Screen magazine inspired Single Line Deco JNL, an Art Deco monoline which is available in both regular and oblique versions. The font is based on the hand lettered headline touting “Modern Eyes”.

Sheet music featuring a song from the 1933 film "Torch Singer" starring Claudette Colbert was the basis for Dine and Dance JNL. A multi-line Art Deco design, it epitomizes both the typographic style and the night life of the time, when supper clubs featuring big bands were at their peak. Torch Singers were female vocalists who typically sang melancholy love songs of lost love and heartbreak.

Amongst some pages scanned and posted online of old wood type alphabets comes this lovely, ornamental design in a reversed style of white lettering on black rectangular boxes. This classic set of wood type is now available digitally as Wood Fancy Reverse JNL. There is a narrow blank box on the “less than” key for use as an end cap, and a wider blank box on the “greater than” key to use between words as a blank space if so desired.

Print Shop Treasures JNL is another fun collection of nostalgic cartoons, stock cuts, corner pieces, embellishments, sales helpers and miscellany; all carefully re-drawn from examples of vintage letterpress pieces.

Part and Parcel JNL is a collection of twenty-six packaging and shipping labels in a retro style. Use them for spot illustrations or scale them to make actual labels. Please refer to the license agreement for specific use in commercial applications regarding derivative or salable works.

A 1922 piece of sheet music entitled “Japanese Sailor” had its title hand lettered in a Far Eastern motif. This design is now available as Sea of Japan JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Printing Press Extras JNL is another collection of classic printing embellishments and stock cuts from Jeff Levine, with a few new ones thrown in for good measure.

Occasionally font projects are started, but then set aside for other designs and are subsequently forgotten for a while. Such is the case of More Deco Lettering JNL; a bold thick-and-thin sans modeled from vintage source material.

Wood Sans Narrow JNL is based on examples of an extra condensed Hamilton Wood Type. The design was cleaned up a bit to provide more uniform stroke widths, but still retains the nostalgic feel of a tall, narrow type face found on broadsides and posters of the late 1800s. It is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Wood Type Bodoni JNL is a variant of the popular ultra bold version of the classic Bodoni design, with variants in character widths and shapes. Based on a vintage set of wood type, the "hairline" strokes of the 4 and 8 have been made ever-so-slightly thicker in spots to add a modest amount of additional contrast.

In the pre-computer, pre self-adhesive label era of office supplies a number of companies (including Dennison, Maco and Denny-Reyburn) manufactured a wide variety of gummed labels for just about any use or purpose. Blank labels, specialty labels and decorative holiday seals were just a part of this line. One popular style was that of labels with parallel thick-and-thin borders of red lines and corners chamfered, rounded or straight cut. Occasionally, one could find similar labels with blue, green or gold borders but red was the mainstay, hence naming this typeface Red Border Labels JNL. Presented in this font is a collection of twenty-six standard and specialty shape label borders on the capital (A-Z keys) and twenty-six solid panel versions on the lower case (a-z) keys which can be used as backfills for the borders or as stand-alone labels.

An old ad for Cointreau Triple Sec Liquor featured a bolder variant of the lettering style found in a set of vintage tin stencils that were the model for French Stencil JNL. This is now available as Belle Epoque Stencil JNL, in both regular and oblique versions. “Belle Epoque” means “beautiful era” in French.

Novelty songs and their often crazy or extra-long titles were all the rage at the beginning of the 20th century. A piece of sheet music for the 1920 song "When Chu-Ching-San weds Paddy McCann" had the title hand lettered in an unusually bold form of Asian-inspired lettering. This has been recreated digitally as the type font named for the song - Chu Ching San JNL.

A 1963 image of the New View Theater in Los Angeles with its marquee’s Art Deco neon lettering was the inspiration for Silver Screen Deco JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

A type foundry example showcasing some letters from a narrow slab serif wood type design served as the inspiration for Wood Serif Poster JNL. This condensed typeface is available in both regular and oblique versions, and digitally recreates the kind of lettering found on flyers, broadsides and newspaper headlines of the mid-to-late 1800s.