I saw an old logo for Giro d'Italia on telly, and was just smitten by the truly ugly type: just ruler and compass work, no intakes or optical corrections whatsoever. I just had to turn that into a font.

Inspired by the calligraphic poster art of Santa Fe's Randall Hasson, Personal Message JNL is part calligraphic, part cartoon lettering. A light, casual and friendly design, Personal Message JNL can be applied to many different print or web projects with equally attractive results.

Take a midnight stroll if you dare through the shadowy terrace of terror, in Nightmare Street! A bloodcurdling design supplied in two styles with additional underlines and paint spills, Nightmare Street is an 80s inspired horror font straight from the video store. It’s the perfect choice when you want a hand-made look for your movie posters and trailers, album covers, books and Halloween promos. This font includes complete uppercase and lowercase characters plus punctuation, numerals and language support. It also comes with a full set of alternatives ensuring that you’ll never have to repeat your e’s or t’s for a more convincing and authentic hand-drawn look. Check out the visuals for more details and usage examples.

Spekta is an unorthodox Neo-Grotesk typeface devoted to versatility and beauty. Originally designed as an all-caps display typeface influenced by Bauhaus and early grotesque forms, Spekta switched priorities and evolved into a well-equipped 8-weight workhorse boasting 667 characters and italics to boot. Spekta’s focus on condensed forms and a greater x-height and cap height difference compared to typical Grotesque types allows for increased legibility at smaller sizes while utilising less horizontal space. Despite this, Spekta respects its display-type roots with elegant forms influenced by a mix of early and modern Grotesque typefaces and countless trial-and-error. Additionally, two sets of diacritics (marks such as acutes, graves, circumflexes, and so on) have been designed to further improve readability and reading flow, an atypical feature for most typefaces. Spekta is devoted to versatility, handing control to the designer with 8 stylistic sets (that only affect a single character and not a group of them), 4 number sets, true superscript, subscript, and scientific subscript characters (unlike what design softwares generate), ordinals, alternative and full-width characters, and much more.

The Terminus typeface is an exploration of what occurs to letterforms when flip-disc display and variable-message signs begin to malfunction. Whether caused by analog or computer error, there is a mechanical beauty and randomness in the deterioration of the forms. Dresser's wild take on this concept purposely pushes the limits of legibility along with incorporating historical bits and pieces from blackletter and uncial script forms into this modern digital grid. OpenType font features provide the user with four options to use the typeface. Simply load the default Terminus for a surprisingly legible breakdown of digital characters. Select “Contextual Alternates” for a random selection of altered forms from the 994 glyphs included in the font. With the Glyph Palette open, manually select from the five full character sets to create your own unique settings. Lastly, choose “Stylistic Alternates” for an extreme test of legibility. This setting combines characters from the default font with the most elaborate set of alternates and best exemplifies the organic disintegration of Terminus.

Johnny is the latest addition to the long line of popular psychedelic/hippy/funky art nouveau fonts representing the retro side of the Canada Type library. It is the digitization of a popular 1969 Phil Martin typeface that was known by two different names: Harem and Margit. The film type version had plenty of irregularities and quirks that made it seem like it was done in a hurry. In this digital version the errors have been corrected and the character set expanded to include international characters with built-in alternates, to be on par with what today's layout artists expect from a high quality font. This font saw a lot of use on record sleeves and music posters throughout the pre-disco part of the 1970s, which makes it a veteran of both the psychedelic and funk periods. This makes it the sharper, sturdier art nouveau contemporary personality of Canada Type's Tomato font. This font contains a very expanded character set that includes full support for Central, Eastern and Western European languages, as well as Baltic, Turkish, Esperanto, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese.

‘Пивная’ (Pivnaya) means ‘bar’ or ‘brewhouse’ in Russian. Pivnaya Latin is a display font published by Roman Type. Initially designed for a poster, the family quickly turned multi-script. In 2019, the global design community is busy celebrating the centennial of Bauhaus, silently triggering the question as to if or how the phenomenon matters in the lives we lead today, or whether it could rather be reduced to mere historic purposes. At that point, I found myself falling into the Bauhaus trap myself, preparing a typeface design workshop for a group of Lithuanian and Russian students. But by a typing error, I accidently made Google translate ‘Brauhaus’ (brewhouse) instead of ‘Bauhaus’. That is why I called this family ‘Pivnaya’ in the end. Pivnaya Latin works for: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanisch, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Zulu. Though being a decorative font, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) increases usability for all kinds of purposes.

The hand lettered words “Pere Noel” under a vintage French magazine’s photo of Santa with two bikini-clad beauties inspired the digital version of this quirky, condensed type style. Unusually Deco JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions From Wikipedia: “Père Noël “Papi Christmas”, sometimes called ‘Papa Noël’ (“Daddy Christmas”), is a legendary gift-bringer at Christmas in France and other French-speaking areas, identified with the Father Christmas and/or Santa Claus of English-speaking territories. Though they were traditionally different, all of them are now the same character, with different names, and the shared characteristics of a red outfit, workshop at the North Pole/Lapland, and a team of reindeer.”