Father's Day, or June 17 of this year, is in the middle of Argentinian winter. And like people do on wintery Sunday mornings, I was bundled up in bed with too many covers, pillows and comforters. Feeling good and not thinking about anything in particular, Father's Day was nowhere in the vicinity of my mind. My eleven year old son, Matías, came into the room with a handmade present for me. Up to this point, my Father's Day gift history was nothing unusual. Books, socks, hand-painted wooden spoons, the kind of thing any father would expect from his pre-teen son. So you can understand when I say I was bracing myself to fake excitement at my son's present. But this Father's Day was special. I didn't have to fake excitement. I was in fact excited beyond my own belief. Matí's handmade present was a complete alphabet drawn on an A4 paper. Grungy, childish, and sweeter than a ton of honey. He'd spent days making it, three-dimensioning the letters, wiggle-shadowing them. Incredible. A common annoyance for graphic designers is explaining to people, even those close to them, what they do for a living. You have to somehow make it understandable that you are a visual communicator, not an artist. Part of the problem is the fact that "graphic designer" and "visual communicator" are just not in the dictionary of standard professions out there. If you're a plumber, you can wrap all the duties of your job with 3.5 words: I'm a plumber. If you're a graphic designer, no wrapper, 3.5 or 300 words, will ever cover it. I've spent many hours throughout the years explaining to my own family and friends what I do for a living, but most of them still come back and ask what it is exactly that I do for dough. When you're a type designer, that problem magnifies itself considerably. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you start looking for the nearest exit, but none of the ones you can find is any good. All the one-line descriptions are vague, and every single one of them queues a long, one-sided conversation that usually ends with someone getting too drunk listening, or too tired of talking. Now imagine being a type designer, with a curious eleven year old son. The kid is curious as to why daddy keeps writing huge letters on the computer screen. Let's go play some ball, dad. As soon as I finish working, son. He looks over my shoulder and sees a big twirly H on the screen. To him it looks like a game, like I'm not working. And I have to explain it to him again. This Father's Day, my son gave me the one present that tells me he finally understands what I do for a living. Perhaps he is even comfortable with it, or curious enough about that he wants to try it out himself. Either way, it was the happiest Father's Day I've ever had, and I'm prouder of my son than of everything else I've done in my life. This is Matí's font. I hope you find it useful.

As Word War I raged on during 1917, a large number of songs were written as morale builders for both the soldiers leaving for overseas service as well as their friends, family and loved ones. One such song, "Send Me Away with A Smile" has its title hand lettered in a simple, yet somewhat stylized sans serif design that was so much a part of the Art Nouveau style of that era. Simply Nouveau JNL captures and preserves that design within a digital typeface; available in both regular and oblique versions.

Schoolyard Blues JNL is based on the hand lettered title found on the sheet music for the 1938 song "I Was Late for School". A condensed sans serif with chamfered corners, it reflects the Art Deco influences of the day in some of the letter forms. This type design is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Shanghai JNL is loosely based on the title lettering from “Charlie Chan in Shanghai”, one of the long-running series of detective films featuring the Asian sleuth and his “number one son”.

Rebus Script is a fun, lively font that lets you create rebus puzzles by automatically replacing certain words or syllables with pictures. This font is an advanced OpenType font that requires an application that supports Contextual Alternates. The font was created by Terrance Weinzierl and is based on the Louisville Script handwriting font designed by Steve Matteson. To use the font you simply type a word like 'sun' or 'son' and those letters will automatically be replaced by a picture of the sun. There are over 70 pictorial symbols in Rebus Script that make up the 'vocabulary' for automatic substitution based on over 300 different syllable/word combinations in various cases (lower, upper, titling) in the English language.

In a specimen book from Stevens, Shanks & Sons, Ltd. of London (circa1930s) “Royal Gothic” was their version of a classic grotesk sans that had been in use as far back as 1899 when the Keystone Foundry called it “Charter Oak”. The terms "gothic" and "grotesk" were equally applied to early sans serif typefaces – at first not well embraced by printers as being too ugly (grotesque) for use. One familiar characteristic of early grotesk fonts (such as this one) is the numerous variations of character widths and shapes. By combining those two terms into a font name, the digital version of this design is called Gothic Grotesk JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

P22 Civilite is a historic font revival. The font is a non-connecting upright handwriting script based on 16th century sources with a lineage going back to Robert Granjon in France and from early Dutch type specimens from the Enschede and Sons Foundry. The P22 Civilite suite of fonts includes the 6 basic Dutch versions of Civilite in both "historical" and "modern" styles in basic OpenType format and Pro versions that combine the historical, modern & sorts into one OpenType font with alternates, expanded language coverage and pro features.

The 1920s were part of an era in songwriting where snappy wordplay and clever (if not long) titles prevailed. The lettering on one such piece of sheet music with the song title "In A Shady Nook by A Babbling Brook" offered up a bold, condensed sans serif design which is now available digitally as Brookside JNL. Available in both regular and oblique versions.

Type designer Hannes von Döhren created a display typeface called "Blow Up". A bubbly, sweet font with nice light effects. Perfect for use in big sizes on posters or flyers. You can use Blow Up Sans & Blow Up Bling together to influence the color of the light effects.

A September 29, 1920 edition of The San Diego Union ran the headline “Cicotte Confesses Baseball Fraud; Eight White Sox Players Indicted”. The White Sox baseball scandal was the first to reveal illegal gambling on the game. However, the headline itself was set in a bold slab serif type style [likely ATF Foster] which served as the model for Good Reporting JNL; which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The hand lettered sans serif title on the1931 sheet music for “(Potatoes are Cheaper-Tomatoes are Cheaper) Now’s the Time to Fall in Love” presented another opportunity to create a typeface from the wealth of unusual alphabets found on the covers of vintage and antique song sheets. However, it seems that even as late as the 1930s, song writers had the urge to pen long-worded titles for their musical compositions. This thirteen word verbal excursion became the model for Casual Deco JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Sheet music for the song "I'm the One That Loves You" has the title hand lettered in a narrow, Art Deco-influenced sans serif, which is now available digitally as Dance Band JNL in both regular and oblique versions. The 1937 composition was popularized by Tommy Dorsey and Sammy Kaye.

Junior Clerk JNL is the plain sans serif version of the lettering found on the cover of the sheet music for 1919's "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise". The song title was originally set in a decorative sans serif with an engraved line adorning each character. This version of the more fanciful design is available as the companion font Legal Eagle JNL. Junior Clerk JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Another variant to the ever-popular Art Deco sans lettering with solid centers (no counters) was found in the hand-lettered title on the cover of the 1933 song "There's A Ring around the Moon". This became the basis for the digital typeface Moonlit Walk JNL, available in both regular and oblique versions.

Brandon Grotesque is a sans serif type family of six weights plus matching italics. It was designed by Hannes von Döhren in 2009/10. Influenced by the geometric-style sans serif faces that were popular during the 1920s and 30s, the fonts are based on geometric forms that have been optically corrected for better legibility. Brandon Grotesque has a functional look with a warm touch. While the thin and the black weights are great performers in display sizes the light, regular and medium weights are well suited to longer texts. The small x-height and the restrained forms lend it a distinctive elegance. Brandon Grotesque is equipped for complex, professional typography. The OpenType fonts have an extended character set to support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European languages. Brandon Grotesque won the TDC2 Award, 2011.

Volkolak is the ultimate serif-sans-grotesque tribrid, its numerous cuts will give you many options represent a typesetter's dream! Designed as one, it offers a serif, a contrasted sans serif and a grotesque style. The numerous typesetting options offered this way gives it a ton of usability and functionality in many different mediums, editorial design, books, magazines, posters, visual identity, web design... You won't find a project in which you can't use this true workhorse superfamily!