Times with a Human Face: In my article of the same name which appeared in the magazine Font, volume 2000 I described the long and trying story of an order for a typeface for the Czech periodical Lidové noviny (People’s Newspaper). My task was to design a modification of the existing Times. The work, however, finally resulted in the complete re-drawing of the typeface. The assignment, which was on the whole wisely formulated, was to design a typeface which would enable “a smooth flow of information in the reader’s eye”, therefore a typeface without any artistic ambitions, from which everything which obstructs legibility would be eliminated. A year later Lidové noviny had a different manager who in the spring of 2001 decided to resume the cooperation. The typeface itself definitely profited from this; I simplified everything which could be simplified, but it still was not “it”, because the other, and obviously more important, requirement of the investor held: “the typeface must look like Times”. And that is why the above-mentioned daily will continue to be printed by a system version of Times, negligently adjusted to local conditions, which is unfortunately a far cry from the original Times New Roman of Stanley Morison. When I was designing Lido, the cooperation with the head of production of Lidové noviny was of great use to me. Many tests were carried out directly on the newspaper rotary press during which numerous weak points of the earliest versions were revealed. The printing tests have proved that the basic design of this typeface is even more legible and economical than that of Times. The final appearance of Lido STF was, however, tuned up without regard to the original assignment – the merrier-looking italics and the more daring modelling of bold lower case letters have been retained. The typeface is suitable for all periodicals wishing to abandon inconspicuously the hideous system typefaces with their even more hideous accents and to change over to the contemporary level of graphic design. It is also most convenient for everyday work in text editors and office applications. It has a fairly large x-height of lower case letters, shortened serifs and simplified endings of rounded strokes. This is typical of the typefaces designed for use in small sizes. Our typeface, however, can sustain enlargement even to the size appropriate for a poster, an information table or a billboard, as it is not trite and at the same time is moderate in expression. Its three supplementary condensed designs correspond to approximately 80% compression and have been, of course, drawn quite separately. The intention to create condensed italics was abandoned; in the case of serif typefaces they always seem to be slightly strained. I named the typeface dutifully "Lido" (after the name of the newspaper) and included it in the retail catalog of my type foundry. In order to prevent being suspected of additionally turning a rejected work into cash, Lido STF in six designs is available free of charge. I should not like it if the issuing of this typeface were understood as an “act out of spite” aimed against the venerable Times. It is rather meant as a reminder that there really are now alternatives to all fonts in all price categories.

The 1920 song “Noah’s Wife Lived a Wonderful Life (‘Cause Noah Had to Stay Home)” is another example of one of those overly-worded song titles from early 20th Century composers. What’s more important for type enthusiasts is that the title was hand lettered with a round nib pen in a slightly ragged Art Nouveau style. Cleaning up the ragged design, the end result became Nouveau Showcard JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

I started this font on a Monday and I finished it the Monday after, so I guess the name is right! Another Monday started off as a bit of doodling (with a Sharpie pen) on a piece of paper. Before I knew it, I had a complete glyph set and it looked nice. Another Monday is a bit messy, uneven and maybe even a little weird, but it will look good on postcards, packaging and labels.

Kanna Aoki had fairy tales in mind when she designed MVB Greymantle. She drew dots with a felt pen to build up the forms, giving them their particular rough character. The “Extras” font contains a set of whimsical illustrations, including a portrait of Greymantle—her 18-pound cat, a set of curly initial caps, and border parts.  MVB Greymantle has been spotted on numerous children's books, in magazines, in salad dressing advertisements, and on food packaging.

A vintage rubber stamp alphabet and star printing set had a package header with Art Deco-inspired lettering describing the product. Sold by a company called Elvin [circa late 50's-early 1960s], these Japanese-made sets were one of many distributed by independent toy importers and made in various configurations including [at times] tiny animal stamps. The type design on this particular item was the model for Retro Packaging JNL, available in both regular and oblique versions.

I don't know what is it with me and bad copy machines these days...my previous font also had that look, like it was made using a poor copy machine! :) Basic Choice comes in a regular, solid and distressed version - use these versions as they are, or play around and use them as layers. Each letter has 6 different versions, and they automatically cycle as you type. It makes the text look scrambled and random at the same time!

In designing a font that had a Mayan or Aztec quality to it without the usual "Mariachi" look, I decided to make it single weight with some open ends and offbeat rounded serifs to give it a more serious feel which will lend itself to other non ethnic uses. I have added a few discretionary ligatures, which also contain old-style numerals, titling caps and small caps. Usage recommendations: Captions, packaging, cards, posters, ads, book jackets, manuals, and menus.

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.

The cover of the 1919 sheet music for "While Others are Building Castles in the Air I'll Build A Cottage for Two" had its title hand lettered in a wonderfully eccentric Art Nouveau serif design that typified the era. Also typical of the time was the habit of various songwriters to come up with wordy titles. This particular one checks in at fourteen words. Nonetheless, the sheet music's title inspired Air Castles JNL and its oblique counterpart.

Kabouter (kaːˈbɑu̯.tər) means ‘gnome’ in Dutch. I have no particular love for gnomes (even though I have a font called Garden Gnome…), but this font had a fairytale feeling to it and the name looked good. Kabouter is a happy display font. It is fun, bouncy and quirky. Use it for your book covers, toy-packaging and home made apple sauce labels. Besides that, you now know how to say gnome in Dutch, which will leave your friends astounded! ;-)

Tacit is the first typeface to be the creative outcome of a PhD thesis in graphic design. The work's main study had the aim of documenting design processes in an effort to externalise the tacit (experiential) knowledge of graphic designers. Initially the task was only to design several glyphs but the work resulted in a full typeface. Tacit is an elegant sans serif with a distinctive character and is legible at small and large point sizes.

Sometimes is a fancy signature font with 2 styles: regular and slant. It is inspired by luxury and branded items. It is perfect for logos, branding, photography, invitations, watermarks, advertisements, product designs, stationery, wedding designs, labels, product packaging, special events or anything that need hand-writting taste. Thanks for checking it out, and feel free to drop me a message if you had any queries! Oh, and come and say hello over at email : almarkhatype@gmail.com ~ Almarkha Type

A set-aside work file featuring a bold sans serif typeface that may or may not have had a vintage source history was given a new treatment. Initially, the solid design was converted to a stencil format and an experiment was undertaken to see what the alphabet would look like with a dual line treatment. Surprisingly, it turned out quite well and the end result is Dual Line Stencil JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

The other day, a couple of kids at work (I work as a kindergarten teacher!) played this game where they were detectives. Not the usual detective, but someone who worked for cookies and biscuits! They called themselves The Biscuit Kids, and I knew instantly that I had to make a font with that name! My Biscuit Kids font is a playful comic book font, but also suitable for anything that needs a fresh extra spicy attention!

Wine Cellar JNL is a bold, yet casual display face found on some 1930s-era sheet music entitled "Everybody Wants a Key to My Cellar". Since the subject of the song had a number of good times underneath the house, it's a fitting name for the font. The hand lettering for the original song sheet showed strong influence of the 1920s and the Art Nouveau style, and has hints of the popular metal type "Hobo" in its character shapes.

This crisp and constructed Ludwig Wagner, Leipzig, blackletter font in textura style had been originally designed by Berthold Wolpe. Freshly redrawn and redesigned, it adds now to the treasure trove of historic typefaces. This font contains a bunch of useful ligatures, and it is recommended to activate Discretionary Ligatures too. By typing 'N', 'o' and period plus activating Ordinals you get an oldstyle numbersign. As usual in my blackletter fonts, the # key is occupied by the 'round' s.

A vintage piece of sheet music for "Waitin' at the Gate for Katy" (from the 1934 movie "Bottoms Up") provided the hand-lettered, Western-influenced lettering which is now available as Badlands JNL. Some of the characters originally had overly-thick vertical strokes which stood out from the rest of the letters, so they were "standardized" in order to provide a more aesthetically pleasing overall design. Available in both regular and oblique versions to fit your design needs.

It Had to Happen! Here Comes The World's Greatest Comic Book Font! It's A Collector's Item Classic! It's One of Comicraft's Greatest! You Wanted Our Silver Age Style Font -- last seen in the Pulse Pounding Pages of DC's SUPERBOY and Marvel's FLASHBACK titles -- and Now You've Got It! Three Thrilling Feature-Length Fonts! They're the Strangest Sans Serif Fonts of All! Proof Yet Again That This is Indeed the Comicraft Age of Comics! Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, Blah Blah Blah...

In the German city of Bad Neuenahr you can visit a spa called Thermal Badehaus. This beautiful art deco building has an even more beautiful art deco lettering covering its facade. I had to work with only a couple of glyphs ('Thermal Badehaus' to be exact) and tried to capture their beauty in the remaining glyphs. The result is a font called Badehaus (Bath House in German). It is a bold, all caps typeface, with some unique glyphs.

The three largest sizes of type made by the Caslon foundry are strangely unlike the famously consistent text faces cut by William Caslon. Perhaps they were the work of other hands—or of the master in a funky mood. Caslon’s text types have often been revived, but the display sizes, forceful and a touch eccentric, had no digital version until Matthew Carter’s Big Caslon. With striking Italics and rich design features , this typeface shines at BIG sizes.

Blackminster is a Gothic font, inspired by a handwritten set of letters (designed by Harry Lawrence Gage) I found in a 1916 book about lettering. I only had the ABC/abc to work with, so I designed the remaining glyphs myself. Use Blackminster for your Metal album covers, skateboards and downhill mountain bikes, or just anything that requires a bit of a Gothic look! Comes with a serious amount of diacritics and an alternate, swashy, g and y.

Brooklyner font is based on the typeface used for The Brooklynite, a magazine which saw its heyday in the 1920's. The typeface before you is an all caps affair, making it a perfect choice for headlines, posters and ads. Since I had to work with just a handful of glyphs (11 to be precise), it took me a while to design the rest. Brooklyner font is loose, cartoonesque and very legible - and it comes with extensive language support.

Rackem PB started as a digitization of a film typeface known as "Eightball" by LetterGraphics, not to be confused with Eightball that was released by other film type companies of a totally different look. This crazy typestyle had all the flavor it needed to make regular appearances in 70's sticker body modification ads for Chevrolet cars and trucks side panels. Loaded with hooptie appeal, it's something you really need to take for a ride to appreciate its novelty.

"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! :)

Safety is influenced by works from the Machine Age which had its greatest period between the two world wars and celebrated the triumphs of the late Industrial Age including mass production, skyscrapers, radio & phonographs, hydroelectric power and streamlined styling in industrial design. It is based on an Art Deco display style lettering known most popularly as Broadway or Manhattan but, having existed in a multitude of incarnations from showcard lettering to neon signs for a century.

A lament is a sad song, and the music of the cowboys of the Old West had their fair share of them. However, a vintage piece of sheet music from the early part of the 20th century with the title "The Dying Cowboy" brought at least one positive trait to its mournful song. The title lettering was drawn in a fashion that emulated lettering made with quick strokes of a paintbrush, and became the inspiration for Cowboy Lament JNL.

Early 1900s songwriters had a penchant for devising lengthy titles for their compositions. A perfect example from 1909, "It Is Hard to Kiss Your Sweetheart When the Last Kiss Means 'Good Bye'" is a whopping fourteen words long. The sheet music for this piece has a hand lettered, Art Nouveau sans serif design which became the working model for La Vie Nouveau JNL [which translates to "the new life"], and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Crowd Funded fonts wasn’t really crowd funded… In fact, all of the funding came from me, as I had to buy paper and a new pen to get this font going! Crowd Funded is an all caps display font, which I based on a recent font of mine called Longreach. Crowd Funded is narrower and rounder than Longreach and, in a way, more delicate. It comes with a generous amount of diacritics and basic Cyrillic as well!

Here’s another gem by Ross F. George from the Speedball Text Book. It was originally entitled simply Bold Display (Modern Alphabets on Parade) and had a graduated spatter pattern. This version omits the pattern, but keeps the bold, brassy lines. Use it whenever you need an unusual and dynamic headline with a strong retro vibe. Both versions include the complete Unicode Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets, with localization for Moldovan and Romanian.

Style and elegance in 14 styles PS Fournier, created by Stéphane Elbaz, is designed in tribute to Pierre Simon Fournier. Fournier was the prolific Parisian type designer whose work is best known for its iconic representation of French transitional style. PS Fournier elegantly represents the transition to the modern era of typography. Featuring three optical sizes, PS Fournier is designed to perform in any context. The Pierre Simon Fournier heritage Pierre Simon Fournier (1712—1768) was a leading innovative type designer of the mid-18th century. Early in his career, the young Pierre Simon developed a strong aesthetic that he cultivated throughout his life. His art is representative of the pre-revolutionary “Age of Enlightenment” (Siècle des Lumières). Precursor of the Modern style, Fournier’s body of work deeply influenced his times, and created the fertile ground from which the Didot family and Giambattista Bodoni developed their own styles. During the historical period of the 18th century, Fournier exemplified the intellectual pursuits of the times with his own research on type, documenting in detail the typefounding process. He also offered a unique vision: he is the first to clearly comprehend the concept of “type family,” sorting a set of similarly styled alphabets by sizes, width, and by x-heights. In addition, Fournier is one of the earliest advocates of the point system to organize the practice of typography, the point system that contemporary typographers continue to use to this day. The refined and discreet elegance of PS Fournier With a close look at the family, one finds you’ll find that the difference between the optical sizes (Petit, standard and Grand) is more than a contrast variation between the thin and the thick; the eye can also denote a palette of distinct tones: More streamlined and robust in the smaller sizes (Petit), more refined and detailed in the larger sizes (Grand). The PS Fournier standard family is designed to adapt to any situation with its intermediate optical size, from body copy to headlines. With a bit of tracking, PS Fournier Petit will make the smallest captions perfectly readable. However, Petit family is not limited to body and captions — its “slabby robustness” will make a relevant headline choice as well. PS Fournier Grand presents a higher contrast adapted to large text sizes, displays or banners. Its refined elegance makes it a perfect choice for Design, Fashion or Luxury publications. As a “modern” type PS Fournier Grand features a larger x-height than the preexistent old style typefaces such as Garamond or Jenson. These proportions provide any basic text set in PS Fournier Grand a strong typographic texture. As a result, the PS Fournier global family is a versatile alternative to the Modern typefaces commonly used in the publishing industry. The optical sizes, the large range of weights, and the design variations make this family adaptable to captions, paragraphs, and pages, as well as to large texts and displays. A leading-edge typography in the 18th century In the spirit of modernity, Pierre Simon Fournier did not find any use for the conventional swashes still produced by peers such as Caslon or Baskerville. Nevertheless the French designer created many inventive elements to decorate the page and set delightful variations in the text itself. To this regard PS Fournier includes a large set of glyphs variations, ligatures and more than one hundred glyphs for borders, rules and ornaments or — as called in French — “vignettes.” PS Fournier: A tribute to the French modern typography era by Stéphane Elbaz

Finally, a font that’s ready for your pixel adventures. Johto is a hand-crafted, pixelated font that captures the excitement of 1990s Tokyo for today’s developers, designers, and video-game makers. We all love the pixelated games we played as kids. Now, as programmers, video makers, and creators of side projects that make our hearts pound with passion, there is nothing more satisfying than imagining ourselves in the shoes of the people that inspired us. We want to feel like we're right back there in the excitement of 1990s Tokyo, as an artist or engineer. Johto was created because of our disappointment with the pixel fonts we found online. And for people like us, who care deeply about the quality of our work - especially the work we do for ourselves - we realized we needed a high-quality pixel font to give our work the look it deserves. With over six hundred characters plus support for dozens of languages, including Japanese, tons of fun hand-crafted ligatures to get the look right, Johto is an authentic nostalgia trip. It has all those missing details you didn't notice, but your brain did.

Centro Serif Pro is an award-winning typeface. It received a Gold Award from the European Design Awards 2008 and an Excellence Award from the International Type Design Competition 2009 as part of the Centro Pro type system. This large series of 40 fonts with 1519 glyphs each is composed of three superfamilies (serif, sans and slab), includes true italics and supports Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. According to the jury of the European Design Awards “...Centro Pro is an almost ‘invisible’ typeface with distinct personality, it has legibility as its main attribute and is ideal for a wide range of design works. It does not attract any unnecessary attention, but rather serves its purpose. A rare case of contemporary type family working across three alphabets. Centro Pro meets an ever-growing demand for such typefaces among pan-European companies and institutions”. Centro Pro has become very popular among printed media and is ideal choice for newspapers, magazines and corporate applications. Furthermore every font in this series has been completed with 270 copyright-free symbols, some of which have been proposed by several international organizations for packaging, public areas, environment, transportation, computers, fabric care and urban life.

🏆 Selected for Tipos Latinos 8. 🏆 Hiii Typography 2018 Merit Award. Rocher was designed while looking for an answer to a simple question: what would a typeface look like if it was made of stone? It certainly would look solid, but did we have to add cracks and rubble so it would resemble rocks? We didn’t think so. We decided to tackle the problem a different way. We added corners where there usually aren’t any and threw some unusual letterforms into the mix. The result is a typeface that feels like stone, but if you look closely there is nothing inherently stony about it. Unexpected corners provide just the right amount of roughness, while unusual letterforms give the text an informal aesthetic, traces of something naive and handmade. A family was born when the sturdy letterforms were turned into a series of playful layers. With 9 fonts in total, Rocher can be mixed and matched to create unique layered compositions that add depth to the layout. We designed Rocher to be used in logotypes, packaging, mobile apps and headlines. We are confident you will find another handful of scenarios where it can shine.

In my on-going quest for display fonts to be used with my books and on my book covers, I decided I need a squared sans serif. I started the build off of Fiscal, a font I designed back in 2006. I never liked the font, plus my tastes have changed. So, I opened it, made it narrower, increased the x-height, and various stuff like that. I made it much heavier—an ended up with Boxy. Then my brain slapped me and said, "Why don't you make a sorta modern version?" So, I did and decided to call that style Chic. But then I wanted a thin version also. Fiscal was always too heavy and ponderous for me. So, I made the Thin style. Finally, I felt I needed an italic of Chic. OpenType features didn't seem to work well with the family, so all I added was oldstyle figures. So, I ended up with another of my unique families—with two unmodulated fonts: Thin and Medium, and two modulated fonts: Chic and Chic Italic. But, I'm pleased with it. My hope is that you will like it also.