One example in the 1919 instructional book “One Hundred Alphabets for the Show Card Writer” was for an elegant sans serif with a subtle Art Nouveau style to the letter forms. This is now available digitally as Show Card Elite JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Comic books based on popular characters have been around pretty much since the advent of comic books themselves. An edition of the "Car 54 Where Are You?" series published by Dell (and based on the hit TV show created by Nat Hiken) displayed "Car 54" in a bold hand lettered stencil design on the cover. These few characters became the inspiration for Patrol Car Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

In the collection of vintage and historic images available online from the Library of Congress is one of the exterior of the Town Talk Diner in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Regrettably, on May 28, 2020, the Town Talk Diner was damaged by vandalism, and subsequently destroyed by a fire that engulfed the building early on the morning of May 29th due to civil unrest following the death of George Floyd. The restaurant first opened in 1946, closed in 2011 and subsequently re-opened under new ownership in 2014 with French cuisine, then from 2016 until its demise as an American bistro. While this was not known at the time of selecting the image for a typographic model, subsequent research on the diner turned up these facts. The large vintage sign above the entrance was in big, bold Art Deco letters with rows and rows of bulbs for illuminating the name at night. Coffee and Danish JNL, modeled from the image of that sign, is available in both regular and oblique versions. Perhaps, in a way, the type design will serve as a bit of historic recognition for a popular eating spot.

Printing Press Cuts JNL gathers vintage cartoons, sales helpers and decorative ornaments into one handy collection for embellishing any retro-oriented project.

Town and Country JNL features a mix of block-style characters along with rounded ones found so often in the Art Deco fonts of the 1940s. Modeled from the hand-lettered title on a piece of sheet music from that era, this unusual coupling of two distinct design styles works despite it breaking all of the obvious rules of typography.

From the pages of the 1939 French lettering book “Modèles de lettres modernes par Georges Léculier” (“Models of Modern Lettering”) comes an attractive and unusual set of initial drop caps made from square letters adorned with multiple vertical lines. Originally designed as white letters on black backgrounds, an additional set with black letters on white backgrounds comprise Deco Drop Caps JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

The very first Speedball-Lettering Book was published in 1915, and within its pages was a rough-hewn example of lettering with the name "Rapid Sho-Card Style". The design is now available as Antique Show Card JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

A movie poster for the 1952 Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis comedy “Sailor Beware” had the text rendered in a casual style of brush lettering similar to that found on store show cards. This inspired Show Card Brush JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Antique Stencil Borders Two JNL is the follow-up collection to the July, 2018 release of Antique Stencil Borders JNL and features twenty-six more decorative stencil borders from various vintage sources.

Based on some vintage metal type initial monograms, Long and Thin Initials JNL reproduces this condensed spur serif design in digital form.

A 1942 photograph showing the exterior of the famous Hollywood restaurant Sardi’s and it’s unusually lettered sign was the inspiration for Fine Food JNL. Classically Art Deco, the Sardi’s sign had an ‘S’ looking like an inverted ‘J’ with a flat tail, a traditional ‘A’ replaced by a triangle and the ‘R’ composed of a ‘D’ with a diagonal extension. These elements were balanced against more traditional [but complementary] characters to retain the novel charm of the original signage. Fine Food JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

A breath of fresh air! Seasalt typeface was designed to emulate natural-looking handwritten notes. Opentype ligatures are included to make the typeface appear more realistic and last but not least, it includes a doodles font - arrows, scribbles and scrawls to help your designs pop! The typeface comes in three different variants to suit the look you are after : Upright, Regular and Slanted.

I just visited my good friend Jakob Fischer from Pizzadude.dk in Denmark. As always we talked fonts, drank coffee and walked endlessly through Copenhagen, the city where he lives. We thought it would be a fun idea to each create a font from a handmade sign we saw in the city. We only had like 7 glyphs to work with, so the rest was up to our imagination. We also thought it would be nice to give the fonts a similar name. Mundbind means mask in Danish. When you Google translate it, it will give you the wrong translation (it will say 'mouth piece'), so trust me on this one! My font is called Mundbind NL - where the NL stands for Netherlands. Jakob will hopefully call his finished font Mundbind DK - where the DK stands for Denmark. Mundbind NL comes with a monster load of diacritics (including Vietnamese) and two alternate glyphs for the lower case letters that will cycle as you type.

A few days ago, my good friend David from Hanoded.com visited me for a few days. We drank a lot of coffee and walked the streets of Copenhagen - we even took a trip up in Rundetårn! :) Well, on one of our walk (of course looking for inspiration for new fonts) we spotted this handmade sign. We agreed to make a font of the 7 letters available, using our own imagination and style! I called my font Mundbind DK and David named his Mundbind NL - of course it is the landcodes of Denmark and Holland. As you can tell, the font is uneven and somewhat unpredictable - following only the "rules" of the person who handprinted that sign ... and not many of the rules of the good old and respected painter who make beautiful signs ... however, this sign had it's beauty in a natural and innocent way.

First of all, let me get one thing straight: With Janky Action, I didn’t make any attempt on making a beautiful or good looking font! Janky Action is my humble attempt to recreate a sign I saw at a flea market. The sign was obviously made by someone who didn’t give a darn about the width of strokes, height of letters, and other “rules” when making a sign. I fell in love with the naive approach on how to make a sign. In order to create some randomness, I have added 4 different versions of each lowercase letter. I hope you find this font as enjoyable as I did while making it! :)

The famous favorite of the sign makers. Great for display type as well as headlines for fashion, theater TV etc.

The first versions of Nimbus Sans have been designed and digitized in the 1980s for the URW SIGNUS sign-making system. Highest precision of all characters (1/100 mm accuracy) as well as spacing and kerning were required because the fonts should be cut in any size in vinyl or other material used for sign-making. During this period three size ranges were created for text (T), the display (D) and poster (P) for small, medium and very large font sizes. In addition, we produced a so-called L-version that was compatible to Adobe’s PostScript version of Helvetica. Nimbus was also the product name of a URW-proprietary renderer for high quality and fast rasterization of outline fonts, a software provided to the developers of PostScript clone RIPs (Hyphen, Harlequin, etc.) back then.

Basecoat is a handcrafted, geometric sans serif inspired by sign painting and influenced by modern gothics. It has a subtle organic feel without sacrificing legibility. The design of the uppercase began with chalk marker lettering for a side project and eventually grew into a small type family. Basecoat comes in three weights and includes more than 500 glyphs with European language support. It has popular OpenType features plus catchwords in multiple languages and arrows for all your sign making needs.

Geometric forms make this elegant font a great choise for invitations and signs, indoor and outdoor.

Geometric forms make this elegant font family a great companion for invitations and signs, indoor and outdoor.

Fine strokes make this elegant font family a great companion for invitations and signs, indoor and outdoor.

Geometric forms make this elegant font family a great companion for invitations and signs, indoor and outdoor.

Geometric forms make this elegant font family a great companion for invitations and signs, indoor and outdoor.

Geometric forms make this elegant font family a great companion for invitations and signs, indoor and outdoor.

This geometric typeface makes it very useful for headlines, signs and short texts. The variety of 8 weights makes it ideal for signage and captions.

DetourDork was inspired by American highway signs. Hand-drawn with a medium marker, but it looks very clean and straight.

Geometric forms make this elegant font family a great companion for titles, invitations and signs, indoor and outdoor.