The characteristic ‘French face’ was originally made in 1899 under the supervision of Joseph Pinel. Thus, what was originally French 10 pt. Nº 2, got its present name. The Frenchman Joseph Pinel called himself a "typographical engineer", but was at the time employed as a type draughtsman at the Linotype Works in Altrincham. It appears that this and some other faces that he supervised, were, except for use on the Linotype, also meant for manufacturing matrices for the Dyotype. This composing machine was an invention of Pinel. The Dyotype was a rather complicated machine and consisted, like the Monotype, of two separate contraptions, a keyboard which produced a perforated paper ribbon and a casting machine which produced justified lines of movable type. Unlike the Monotype which has a square matrix carrier, the Dyotype had the matrices on a drum (in fact two drums, hence the name of the machine). A Pinel Diotype company was founded in Paris and a machine was built with the help of the printing press manufacturer Jules Derriey. As is often the case, a lack of sufficient capital prevented the commercializing of this ingenious composing machine. Coen Hofmann digitized the font from a batch of very incomplete, damaged and musty drawings, which he dug up in Altrincham. He redrew all characters, bringing up the hairstrokes somewhat in the process. The result is a roman and italic, while the roman font also includes Small Caps

Roller Poster is named after Alfred Roller. In 1902, Roller created a poster to advertise the 16th exhibit of Austrian Artists and Sculptures Association, representing the Vienna Secession movement. The exhibit was to take place in Vienna during January & February 1903. The location is not mentioned because everyone in Vienna knew it would be held at the exhibit hall in the Secession Building at Friedrichstraþe 12, a few blocks south of the Opernring, near the Naschmarkt. Designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich in 1897, the buiilding has been restored and stands today as one finest of the many fine examples of Art Nouveau architecture in Vienna (see vienna_secession_bldg.jpg). Because of its dome, it is called “the golden cabbage.” The poster itself is unique. The word “secession” is in one type style and takes up two-thirds of the elongated poster. At the bottom of the poster are the details in a different lettering style. It is this second style at the bottom that is the basis for the font Roller Poster. In keeping with our regular naming conventions, we were going to call it Roller Gezeichnete (hand-drawn), but the wonderful play on both words and the shape of the three S’s in secession was too compelling. In November 1965 there was an exhibit of Jugendstil and Expressionist art at the University of California. Alfred Roller’s Secession Poster was part of that exhibit. Wes Wilson was designing promotional material at Contact Printing in San Francisco. Among their clients was a rock promoter named Bill Graham, staging dance-concerts at Fillmore Auditorium. Wilson saw the catalog from the UC exhibit and Roller’s lettering. Wilson adapted Roller’s letter forms to his own fluid style. The result was the poster for the August 12-13, 1966 Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead concert at Fillmore put on by Graham (BG23-1). Wilson continued to use Roller’s letter forms on most of the posters he did for Graham through May 1967, when he stopped working for Graham. The posters were extremely successful and the lettering style along with Roller’s letter forms were picked up by other artists, including Bonnie MacLean, Clifford Charles Seeley, James Gardner, and others. The Secession poster and the Fillmore posters have inspired a number of fonts in addition to ours. Among them are JONAH BLACK (& WHITE) by Rececca Alaccari, LOVE SOLID by Leslie Carbarga and MOJO by Jim Parkinson. Each is different and yet each clearly shows its bloodlines. Our font differs in two ways: 1) the general differences in the interpretation of the letter forms and 2) the modification of the basic letter form to incorporate the diacriticals within the implied frame of the letter, after the manner of the original design by Roller. We borrowed Carbarga’s solution to the slashed O and used it, in a modified form, for other characters as well to accomplish the same purpose. We recommend that you buy ours and at least one of the other three. According to Alaccari, a version called URBAN was released by Franklin Lettering in the 70’s (and is shown on page 51 of The Solotype Catalog). For comparison of our font to original design, see image files roller_poster_2s.jpg of original poster and roller_poster_2sx.jpg showing reconstruction using our font for the lower portion (recontructed area indicated by blue bar). Please note the consistency of character width. In the lower case, 23 of the basic 26 letters are 1/2 EM Square wide. The ‘i’ is an eighth narrower, while the ‘m’& ‘w’ are one quarter wider. All the Upper Case letters are 1/8 EM wider than the lower case. This is to make it easier to fill a geometrical shape like a rectangle, allowing you to capture a little of the flavor of Wes Wilson’s Fillmore West poster using only a word processor. We have also included a number of shapes for use as spacers and endcaps. If you have a drawing program that allows you to edit an ‘envelope’ around the letters to distort their shape, you can really get creative. I used Corel Draw for the gallary images, but there are other programs that can accomplish the same thing. The image file “roller_poster_keys.jpg” shows the complete character set with the keystrokes required for each character (see “HiH_Font_readme.txt” for instruction on inserting the non-keyboard characters). The file “roller_poster_widths.jpg” shows the exact width of each character in EM units (based on 1000 units per EM square). You will notice that the font is set wide for readability. However, most programs will allow you to tighten up on the character spacing after the manner of Roller & Wilson. In MS Word, for example, go to the FORMAT menu > FONT > CHARACTER SPACING. Go to the second Drop-Down Menu, labeled ‘Spacing’ and select "condensed' and then set the amount that you want to condense ‘by’ (key on the little arrows); two points (2.0) is a godd place to start. Let your motto be EXPLORE & EXPERIMENT. Art Nouveau has always been one of my favorite movements in art -- I grew up in a home with a couple of Mucha prints hanging on the living room wall. Perhaps because of that and because I lived through the sixties, I have enjoyed researching and designing this font more than any other I have worked on. Let’s face it (pardon the pun), Roller Poster is a FUN font. You owe it to yourself to have fun using it.

When a type design job needs a bit of snap, yet needs to remain unconventional, think of Quirkley JNL. Its name speaks volumes - a bold, quirky sans serif - great for headlines and display work.

Windevere is a family of display faces designed for easily readible headings and titles that convey a sense of speed and motion. The family includes three faces: Windevere Regular, Windevere Bold and Windevere Rounded.

Retro Boldy, a Bold, classy, contemporary of script font, inspired by 90s Era. Retro Boldy offers beautiful typographic harmony for a diversity of design projects, including logos & branding, social media posts, advertisements & product designs.

Rickety Stairs is a cute and neat handwritten font. This adaptable font will look great on a variety of design ideas. It will add a fun and friendly touch to each of your projects!

This font is designed to create typographic textures. It's based on Ankara Display but not in the same family because of some of its different forms. Also, its angular forms give a digital impact.

Modeled from a set of individual painting stencils, Mess Hall JNL is named for the armed services cafeteria where thousands of enlisted men endured bland, boring meals day in and day out for years.

This font consists of individual pieces that can be combined to make a wide variety of borders. For each border design, the pieces generally include four corners, a vertical section, and a horizontal section.

Denso is a font family delivering great force using minimum space. It supports 111 languages, features a total of 309 glyphs and includes an outlined and italicized version for each of the 3 weights.

Contra Condensed is the condensed version of my Contra family of fonts. It is very condensed, but not yet narrow. It is well suited in all situations were one needs to save space. Enjoy!

Movieland JNL is a re-working of Jeff Levine's Art Deco-styled Wingate JNL, with more traditional letter shapes; making it perfect for creating (or recreating) the compact look of movie poster production credits.

Copperplate Classic Light Floral is the latest addition to my Copperplate Classic Group of fonts. The floral decorations go perfectly well together with the classic forms of the Copperplate. Your decorative designer Gert Wiescher.

Designed by Les Usherwood. Digitally engineered by Paul Hickson. Les based the design on a turn-of-the-century typeface of the same name. The foundry is believed to be Soldans & Payvers, circa 1904.

South Town is a simple and flowing handwritten font. This adaptable font will look great on a variety of design ideas. It will add a fun and friendly touch to each of your projects!

Mastone was inspired by the bubble typography trends nowadays in the graphic design industry. A fresh mix of y2k culture, streetwear visuals, and brutalism yet an experimental touch of bubble throw-up graffiti styles.

Seindah Cinttya results out of a stunning pairing of a brush pen that makes it look incredibly endearing and authentic. Use this gorgeous and unique script font to bring any DIY project to life!

Zedou was inspired by old Art Deco flavoured signage from the former French colony of Madagascar. It has a mechanical yet organic feel to it, and consists of four display weights covering Latin Pro.

ITC Tiffany font was designed by Edward Benguiat, a highly contemporary blend of two fonts, Ronaldson and Caxton. The best characteristics of both were combined to produce a refined and refreshing font, ITC Tiffany.

Qara is a breathtaking Didot font that exudes elegance, luxury, and an unparalleled sense of fashion. With its sleek and refined design, Qara captures attention and adds a touch of sophistication to any project.

A stencil font you won't find anywhere else. Part of Market LTD, a collection of limited faces, mostly alpha-numeric and some just plain numeric, used primarily in retail and display situations and titling.

St Transmission was one of the first ambitious projects for Stereotypes. Building a complete family with a lot of weights along with the italics. Transmission supports extended Latin character set, plus Cyrillic and Greek.

This is the "Starslang" font, that features a star shape embedded within the letters of the vowels. The theme was designed to enlighten the mood and spirit with a fun mood of urban atmosphere.

Mighty Oaks is a collection of stylized oak leaves. There are 47 oak leaves located under the character set keys. There is a flopped version of each leaf located under the shift+character key.

Anniversary Seals is composed of a seal design reminiscent of the embossed foil seals used in commemorating company anniversaries. The font contains 100 consecutive characters from the first anniversary through the one-hundredth anniversary.

A new Version of Turquoise Roman Capitals. With specials Tuscan Serifs to add more engraving feel. Turquoise Tuscan is full of ligatures and awesome alternates. Perfect for big headlines, logos, branding and wine labels.

Potenciarte is an all-caps display typeface inspired by the facade of old buildings from the era of Nederlandsch-Indie (1900’s) in Surabaya, where Art Deco & Art Nouveau typographic styles were widely used.

Never Give Up is a simple and friendly handwritten font, featuring the perfect amount of trendiness. This original look will appeal to a wide range of crafty ideas, from letterheads and titles to stationery.

Shayan is an interesting display font inspired by the style and feel of the Middle East Arabic. This font is suitable for branding logos, Ramadan themes, and any other projects you can think of.

Inspired by the former hot-metal fonts of Imprimatur, Gmuender Antiqua Pro is a fresh designed versatile and multilingual serif font family. All five styles contain three different forms of numbers and small caps.

Clobber Grotesk is a grotesk typeface family designed for high readability. It includes a range of weights and a stencil variant. The terminals of the letterforms are slightly flared in order to increase legibility.

»Guilloche B« is a set of graphics that join with each other to form very sophisticated, op-art-like borders. Try them on lots of different assignments, they form very surprising bands or patterns.

Gilas is a beautiful script font, carefully created with a touch of romantic essence. This is a beautiful combination of timeless elegance and authentic calligraphy, and includes beginning and ending swashes for the lowercase.

Bomber was inspired by the lettering used on the vehicles of the U.S. military. This font works great as an old-school style of athletic lettering. Also included is a fifteen character dingbat set.

Belagia is a beautiful script font carefully created with a touch of romantic essence. This is a beautiful combination of timeless elegance and authentic calligraphy, and includes beginning and ending swashes for the lowercase.

Donuto is a bold rounded font. It's suitable for create logos and branding of food, children's and eco-products. The font contains a number of alternate characters, which allows you to create unique combinations.

Dujour is an art deco revival of the 1930s typeface Independent from the Collette and Dufour typefoundry. Steve Matteson created Dujour to enhance posters, signs or other documents with a touch of historical boldness.

Ela Swashes are not meant to and cannot be used as a standalone typeface. Swashes are a set of many different embellished letters to be used together with Ela Demiserif fonts of corresponding weights.

King Malik is an interesting display font inspired by the style and feel of the Turkish font. This font is suitable for branding logos, Turkish themes, and any other projects you can think of.

Gelathy is a beautiful script font carefully created with a touch of romantic essence. This is a beautiful combination of timeless elegance and authentic calligraphy, and includes beginning and ending swashes for the lowercase.