Cake Shop has a lengthy history. Originally designed during the Eighties by Aussie artist David Art Wales, the font was inspired by the awkward but charming hand-lettered signs in a Maltese cake shop near his Sydney home. "These signs were hand-drawn by someone who clearly had no experience but who'd really put their heart and soul into the job. There was a real sincerity to the characters that I wanted to capture." For a brief time during the early Nineties, MTV used Cake Shop for all their on-air interstitials. Since then, it's become a go-to font for everything from children's books to album covers and ice cream branding. In a recent update, Wales added airier spacing to more closely resemble the original signs the font was based on.

Umbilical Noose is a rather scary typeface. It is quite similar to an older font of mine: Nyctophobia. The name comes from a Nirvana song called Heart Shaped Box, in which Kurt Cobain sings: "throw down your umbilical noose, so I can climb right back". I have always liked that phrase a lot. Umbilical Noose is an all caps font, but upper and lower case are different and you can easily interchange the glyphs.

This font was inspired by the hand-written 1648 Munster peace treatise signed by French King Louis XIV and German emperor Ferdinand II. It is a Cancellaresca font style, meticulously written and almost legible. It contains Western (including Celtic) and Northern European, Icelandic, Baltic, Eastern, Central European and Turkish diacritics. The numerous alternates and ligatures made the font looking like a real various hand.

Sunwind is not really made to write long copy. It is a font for shopsigns and short sentences that need that hot, sunny and windy touch. And that is how I got around to designing it: I saw some letters on a shopsign in Cannes when driving into town. I shouted at my son Julius: "Quick take a picture of that sign, the blue one." That's what he did, only he used the macro setting, so I had a very small sign but lots of nice background. Anyway I got the basic idea! Then I made a lot of sketches and this is what came out. I added a smallcaps set and I also made some initials as a rough version, so they look like written with a brush on heavygrain paper. Swinging that brush is yours truly Gert Wiescher

The Eixample project is inspired by modernist signage of various examples found in the Eixample neighbourhood in Barcelona. The name of each subfamily is related to its location or to specific elements of the original sign. Villa is the abbreviation for Carrer Villarroel (Villarroel Street), where the Villarroel Pharmacy has been displaying this sign since the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Eixample Villa typeface system consists of sturdy letters free of ornaments with an industrial aspect. Only the treatment of the curves borrows modernist features. Like the rest of the families in the Eixample series, Villa shows its origin as a display font, but it has been engineered to give good results at small sizes as well.

A new take on the classic font Bodoni, revealing the structural elements of the font, and adding a little sparkle with a pseudo-stencil treatment. The font is named in honor of its original designer and also the undisputed king of the two-chord song. Both versions of the font include the 1252 Latin and 1250 CE character sets (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

IngrimayneType has put letters inside a variety of objects, including bowling pins, book covers, coffee mugs, teapots, pumpkins, Christmas ornaments, train cars, tombstones, old bottles, circles, and rectangles. In each case the letters were placed on a single shape. The use of the Opentype feature of contextual alternatives makes it easy to use two different but alternating shapes. ButterflyWingz puts its letters on the right and left wings of a butterfly. The wings provide a large surface for drawing letters, but they have a odd shape so letters must be distorted to fit. The wings are symmetrical but some letters are not, so the right and left wing versions of the same letter are sometimes quite different. Without the contextual alternative feature one could design a typeface like ButterflyWingz but the user would have to alternate upper and lower case keys. With contextual alternatives turned on, the computer automatically alternates the letters creating a line of complete butterflies. Turning on the Opentype feature stylistic styles one (ss01) replaces the empty spaces with empty wings. However, sometimes an empty wing at the end of a line is unwanted and it can be removed by changing the typeface or by turning off the stylistic style for that character. The family contains two styles, a filled style and an outline style. They can be used separately or together in layers to add color. (Empty wings are on the logicalnot and registered characters.) ButterflyWingz is hard to read and should be used in small doses for decorative effects.

We’re in the process of buying a house. Our first bid was rejected, our second bid as well. Our third (and final) bid was accepted (yay!), so, for us, the old ‘third time lucky’ quote rings true! Third Time Lucky is a set of three distinct handmade fonts, each with its own italic. Use this wonderful set for your books, your packaging or even your ‘house for sale’ signs.

Gilbert JNL is an interpretation of Eric Gill's classic sanserif typeface, which has become an all-purpose workhorse in ad copy. While other versions of gill-sans fonts have multiple weight sets, Jeff Levine chose to replicate this particular weight as a single design [in both regular and oblique versions] because of its popularity with sign makers of the past and give to it the minor nuances of hand-made lettering.

The Adinkra alphabet is a way to write some of the languages spoken in Ghana and Ivory Coast, such as Akan, Dagbani, Ewe and Ga. It is a simplified version of the Adinkra symbols, and was introduced in 2015 by Charles M. Korankye, who has written a number of books about it. According to tradition, the Adinkra symbols were created by Nana Kwadwo Agyemang Adinkra, the King Gyaman people in the Ashanti region of Ghana from 1810 to 1820. Or they were created by Gyaman people, and the king liked them so much that he wore them on his clothes and named that after himself. The Adinkra symbols are used as decoration, logos, arts, sculpture, pottery and so on. The symbols represent sayings, proverbs or concepts, such as wisdom, authority, strength, unity, love adaptability, wealth, peace, war or agreement. Since Unicode codes have not been assigned yet, it is designed on a latin-based font. Please contact me if you want changes to the keyboard layout.

Shiver me Timbers and Splice me Mainbrace! There's strange goings on in Smugglers' Cove... A gathering of thieves, brigands, piratefolk and back-stabbing blackguards the likes of which have not been seen since the days of Redbeard! Someone'll be swinging from the yardarm or walking the plank if the map identifying the location of the fonts created for Grim Todd McFarlane's SPAWN: THE DARK AGES doesn't turn up soon!

Swung Note is a groovy and dynamic font, packed with more than three hundred smart interlocking pairs that do their magic powered by OpenType programming. Since the letters assume different shapes in the many different ligatures, the compositions look truly handcrafted. Swung Note is definitely a great – and quite playful – tool for creating amazing custom-lettered looking designs, while keeping the groove going. Swing-along!

CoolKids was inspired by the song “Signs of Life” by Arcade Fire. Since the lyrics talk about some cool kids we wondered what a typeface with the name cool kids would look like. We immediately knew it had to be laid back yet bold and to stand out from the crowd. After designing the bold script we decided to include a light, regular and medium weight to offer you more options for your designs. It comes with initial and final alternates, that show up automatically, to make it feel more natural and similar to handwriting. Every character was carefully drawn and connections are real smooth. This casual font-family speaks most Latin languages, both in their basic and alternate forms. CoolKids is great for creating logos, packaging, posters and much more. More important than to create a font is to use it… so now it’s up to you to create something awesome with it. Feel free to share your designs with us via email to hi@seventype.com We would love to see and share them with the world!

Alf Becker graced the pages of "Signs of the Times" magazine month after month for decades, presenting attractive and unusual hand lettered alphabets as inspiration for other sign painters and show card writers. From straightforward text faces to novelty ideas, Becker's talent as a master sign crafter was constant in his work. Show Card Casual JNL is one example of what is referred to as a "one stroke" alphabet (utilizing a single brush stroke in each direction to form the letter or number). Its casual look and playful charm allow for a message to be presented in an informal format that is pleasing to the eye. The type design is available in both regular and oblique versions. Special thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Publications for providing the reference material.

Plakkaat is a fat brushed font, made with wide brushes and paint. Since it is a very easy to read font (and not to be missed), it is ideal for advertising campaigns, or demonstration signs. This 2019 version comes with improved kerning, some new and some adjusted glyphs.

The Ale symbol fonts designed by Alessio Leonardi supply a large range of different characters. The two "Ale Ornaments" fonts contain a large set of different spirals, which can be used on tapestries, or as placeholders in presentations. The four separate "Ale Signs" fonts contain a set of daily glyphs, like male and female, smoking and non-smoking, danger, ying and yang, arrows and mathematical signs. The "Ale Transport" font is a large collection of funny pictures for the various kinds of transportation available over air, land and water. Here you can see Alessio's Italian design joy, which he has presented in many ways. Have fun in discovering the various pictures such as the submarine on the railway, or the airplane with a "Do it again" banner.

Influenza, whose name means 'the flu' in a number of languages, is a fat, single weight typeface. It's a bastard typeface, each character stands alone as an independent angular structure. Some characters have stylised blackletter features, some are quasi-bitmapped, some are blends between upper and lower case. This also inspired the name since the flu virus changes every time it comes around, it's a new disease every time you have to stay home under the covers drinking hot tea.

There is a very simple reason why the name of this font includes a potato. Or potatoe, if you prefer. It was carefully carved out of 14,5 kg of potatoes. Or 32.0 lb of potatos. Every single letter, every digit and every symbol. Manually, of course, and care-fully. It took a while. Longer than digitizing it, but since we love great quality, we put just as much care into this process.

Orgovan is based on calligraphic script models lettered with a flat brush, which have been a mainstay in the sign makers' and display artists' handbooks since the beginning of the 1960s. Careful adjustments to the construction of the character shapes made the glyphs more open. This ensures that the face is well legible in small sizes, making it suitable for more demanding typographic applications. The Punk and Rounded variations of the base model offer an even broader range of possible applications, while the Fat Cap, Flower Power and Hairy cuts are contemporary decorative alternatives.

Banzai Bros is a deadly efficient multidisciplinary all-caps assault font. It's highly recommended for posters, signs, flags & banners. Banzai Bros comes with a small set of ornaments. Available as a single font or in packs with other Fenotype fonts.

Giacometti Letter is a fun design by Sine Bergmann and Leonore Poth. It has a rough, handwritten-looking style that is perfect for informal communications. The letters are light and narrow similar to her thin figures in the Pi font Giacometti." When combining Giacometti Letter with other fonts, try using "Jump" - another of Sine's designs - which contrasts well since is it wider and bolder."

“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)?

Anadolu was inspired by the distinct style of sign lettering in rural Turkey, and refined based on sign lettering in Hungary. Shown here are samples in Turkish and Hungarian, as well as Finnish and Estonian, two other languages in the Finno-Ugric language group with Hungarian. The slight curve at the tops of ascenders and bottoms of descenders is inspired by the linguistic process of "vowel harmony" in Turkish and Hungarian. Anadolu is the Turkish name for Anatolia, the peninsula where Turkey lies. The name recalls another sans-serif typeface named for its country of origin. The tittle on the i is reimagined as a diacritic, and the dotless ı is reimagined as the basic, prototypical i. Too many typefaces treat diacritics as afterthoughts. Since diacritics are integral to the languages that inspired Anadolu, they were designed as core components of the typeface.

Samuel Welo’s “Studio Handbook for Artists and Advertisers” contained dozens of hand-lettered alphabets used as inspiration for both the sign trade and for graphic designers. Intertitle Nouveau JNL – available in both regular and oblique versions – was originally an alphabet produced by a round lettering nib, and was first shown in the 1927 edition (later reprinted in the 1960 edition). It is reminiscent of the lettering used on intertitle cards of the silent film era. This font marks an amazing milestone - the 2000th release by Jeff Levine Fonts since its inception in January of 2006.

The free-form Art Nouveau hand lettering for the 1905 song "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May" was the design model for Funky Nouveau JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. Since the 1960s hippie counterculture embraced elements of the Art Nouveau period in their art and design, it seemed only fitting to use the term "Funky Nouveau" in the fontís name as an homage to both eras.

Albertus® Nova is a faithful digital revival of Berthold Wolpe’s earlier design of Albertus and is one of the five designs in The Wolpe Collection of typefaces. This new design enlarges the typeface set from its previous two weights into a robust set of five ranging from thin to black, all with extended language support including Cyrillic and Greek. Berthold Wolpe began working on Albertus in 1932, at the encouragement of Stanley Morison. Morison saw an example of Wolpe’s engraved lettering and liked it so much that he commissioned a typeface based on the design. Since then, the original Albertus typeface has been used on book covers, in branding, on signs and in video games.

Soylent Blu is an original wedge serif, single font designed by Steve Zafarana. Its high contrast character style and bouncy baseline create a visual impact that makes it a good candidate for Signs, headlines, logos and advertisements. The full lowercase set with balanced white space also functions quite well in text. Soylent Blu, with OpenType features, is clearly an attention-getter!

Kansas Casual offers a more upright, gothic, and modern alternative to the conventional sign painter's one stroke. Kansas provides a completely unique take on a overdone classic with proportions and crossbar heights inspired by the more friendly Chicago style. This all-caps set provides six weights so that you can adjust size with weight to maintain that authentic single brush weighted look. The proofing process included projecting, tracing, and then painting the letters out to see how true the small details were to the medium. The set also includes wide language support, opentype fractions, and arrows. You can learn more about its development here.

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

Film Noir JNL is a classic Art Deco Alphabet from the brush of the late master sign painter Alf R. Becker, and appeared in Signs of the Times Magazine. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media and the American Sign Museum for providing the reference material to make this font.

Brasserie, the font, is a tribute to all brasseries since they are wonderful places to relax and enjoy food, wine and friends. It is also a salute to Parisian neon sign makers who continue in their difficult quest to adapt type, including script, into fragile, gas-filled, electric glass tubes. I tried to capture the spirit of these neon signs and combined it with the loosely styled handwritten menus written on blackboards that are usually placed outside Brasseries. You will find Brasserie to be very useful in many situations where you need clarity with style in a reasonably compact width. It is also creates an unusually even texture in sentences. Brasserie is a fairly upright script with a large x-height, which helps to save on overall width. Like a brasserie, the font is a relaxed and informal script, useful for logo, packaging, menus, editorial, advertising, invitations, etc and is available for Mac and PC in Opentype, Truetype and Postscript versions. In France, a brasserie is a café doubling as a restaurant with a relaxed setting, which serves single dishes and other meals. It can be expected to have professional service and printed menus (unlike a bistro which may have neither), but has more informal eating hours than a full-fledged restaurant. Typically, a brasserie is open every day of the week and the same menu is served all day. The word 'brasserie' is also French for brewery and, by extension, "the brewing business".

"Weekday Mornings" are the 2 first words from the song "Nancy" by Prefab Sprout. Just like the song, the font has a romantic theme and could be considered as "easy listening". Well, I've added 7 slightly different versions of each letter, enough to make the font look like the real handwriting which was the base of the font. Fun fact: I had this song on repeat when finishing the font. I still do love that song! :)

In the course of the re-vitalization of its Typoart typeface inventory, Elsner+Flake decided in 2006 to offer the “Kis Antiqua” by Hildegard Korger, in a re-worked form and with an extended sortiment, as an OpenType Pro-version. After consultation with Hildegard Korger, Elsner+Flake tasked the Leipzig type designer Erhard Kaiser with the execution of the re-design and expansion of the sortiment. Detlef Schäfer writes in “Fotosatzschriften Type-Design+Schrifthersteller”, VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig, 1989: No other printing type has ever generated as far-reaching a controversy as this typeface which Jan Tschichold called the most beautiful of all the old Antiqua types. For a long time, it was thought to have been designed by Anton Janson. In 1720 a large number of the original types were displayed in the catalog of the „Ehrhardische Gycery“ (Ehrhardt Typefoundry) in Leipzig. Recently, thanks to the research performed by Beatrice Warde and especially György Haimann, it has been proven unambiguously that the originator of this typeface was Miklós (Nicholas) Tótfalusi Kis (pronounced Kisch) who was born in 1650 in the Hungarian town of Tótfal. His calvinistic church had sent him to the Netherlands to oversee the printing of a Hungarian language bible. He studied printing and punch cutting and earned special recognition for his Armenian and Hebrew types. Upon his return to Hungary, an emergency situation forced him to sell several of his matrice sets to the Ehrhardt Typefoundry in Leipzig. In Hungary he printed from his own typefaces, but religious tensions arose between him and one of his church elders. He died at an early age in 1702. The significant characteristics of the “Dutch Antiqua” by Kis are the larger body size, relatively small lower case letters and strong upper case letters, which show clearly defined contrasts in the stroke widths. The “Kis Antiqua” is less elegant than the Garamond, rather somewhat austere in a calvinistic way, but its expression is unique and full of tension. The upper and lower case serifs are only slightly concave, and the upper case O as well as the lower case o have, for the first time, a vertical axis. In the replica, sensitively and respectfully (responsibly) drawn by Hildegard Korger, these characteristics of this pleasantly readable and beautiful face have been well met. For Typoart it was clear that this typeface has to appear under its only true name “Kis Antiqua.” It will be used primarily in book design. Elsner+Flake added these two headline weights, which are available besides a separate font family Kis Antiqua Now TB Pro. Designer: Miklós (Nicholas) Tótfalusi Kis, 1686 Hildegard Korger, 1986-1988 Erhard Kaiser, 2008

The digital outline fonts, DIN 1451 Fette Engschrift and Fette Mittelschrift were created by URW in 1984 and are the basis for all DIN font families. Both typefaces were designed for the URW SIGNUS system and were mainly used for the production of traffic signs. They have since become so popular that we have developed a complete Arabic DIN family together with Boutros Fonts. The Arabic characters have been designed to harmonize with our Latin URW DIN and come in 24 individual styles, which consist of 8 weights from Thin to Black and three different widths: Regular, Semi Condensed, and Condensed.

Hexide JNL was modeled and modified from an original design created by the late sign artist Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times® Magazine. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Publications, Inc. and the American Sign Museum of Cincinnati, Ohio for providing the reference material used to make this font.

Waite Park JNL is based on the smallest of the die-cut letters and numbers contained in the Webway Sign Cabinet - once manufactured by the Holes-Webway Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The largest of the set's sizes (2 inch) was the model for Sign Kit JNL, the medium size (1-1/8 inch) was used to make Sign Production JNL and this font is a version from the 3/4 inch size. Each size of alphabet and numerals have their own unique characteristics, although they all follow the same basic font style, which is reminiscent of classic Art Deco-era sanserif typefaces. The name Waite Park JNL was derived from a division of Holes-Webway that (for some reason lost to time) distributed their sign kits under the name Waite Park Sign Company, located in the Minnesota city of the same name.