An image of an antique metal marking stencil [circa late 1890s or early 1900s] reading “Folck’s Roller Mills #196 New Surprise manufactured by Wolfe Brothers, Cumberland, MD” had the words “New Surprise” rendered in a Western/Victorian typeface. Those letters served as the model for Old Trail JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Elicit Script is a hybrid script family, that can be as casual or formal as the occasion demands. Created by Laura Worthington and Jim Wasco, the design is based on pointed pen Spencerian Script handwriting. “It’s like one of those German italics from the early 20th century, that have beautiful shapes that hold their own,” says Wasco. Elicit Script spans five weights, from Extra Light to Bold, and three styles – Formal, Normal and Casual. This makes it an incredibly versatile script design, easily paired with other typefaces and able to be dressed up or down, depending on what it’s used for. The monoline Casual style offers a more relaxed tone of voice, while Formal sits at the more decorative end of the spectrum. Designers can keep things straightforward, tidy and practical with the typeface’s simple caps, or add in swash caps if they need more exuberance and expression. Generous spacing means Elicit Script works well at smaller sizes as well. Elicit Script Variable Set is a single font file that features two axes: Weight and Contrast. The Weight axis has instances from Extra Light to Bold. The Contrast axis has instances from Casual (low contrast) to Formal (high contrast).

In 1962, the late Robert Libauer of the Stenso Lettering Company (of Baltimore, MD) revised two of his popular stencil lettering guides to offers users two choices: “traditional” stencil letters and numbers and "solid" letters for tracing and coloring. Solid Stencil JNL was modeled from one of those lettering guides, and contains all of the character anomalies found within that vintage stencil.

Facit is a contemporary sans serif text face. It is designed to be a highly legible and flexible font that does not draw the attention to itself. Instead of being original by itself it is the result of a careful examination of ancient as well as modern formal concepts. “It is by definition impossible to design an un-conventional typeface. Type is pure convention, this is why we can read each other’s written words”, says its designer Tim Ahrens. However, rather than generating an average, existing principles were consciously combined into a unique design solution: The word ‘Facit’, in its German version, means ‘conclusion’. The fonts are provided in OpenType format. Each font contains 720 glyphs. Technically, they follow the Adobe Pro fonts and provide the same glyph set and OpenType functionality. OpenType features include ligatures, true small capitals, superiors, inferiors, numerators and denominators. Every font contains old style and lining figures, both in a proportional and a tabular design. For some letters there alternate characters.

One of the text fonts showcased within the pages of the John Ryan Foundry (Baltimore, MD) specimen book from 1894 is a squared type face with rounded corners called “Geometric”. The original design has been updated slightly by substituting straight lines for the inner corner curves to add a small contemporary touch to a classic alphabet from the 19th century. Business Letter JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Flax Regular lives in a somewhat unusual space... it is not a normal “handwriting” font, nor is it a formal script, or a rounded italic. Flax is a slightly more formal handwriting script that is extremely legible and useful- it can stretch from invitations to packaging, to menus, to brochures to ads. The rough hand-drawn finish gives Flax some of its unique character. This is almost unnoticeable in smaller point sizes while clearly visible in display sizes. While Flax is slightly formal, it has a very friendly presence - mainly from the unpretentious rounded characters and rough finish. Flax is available in Postscript, Truetype and Opentype for Mac and Windows. You will enjoy putting Flax to work!