Who haven't heard the phrase that ‘any past time was better’?. Although I sometimes find this phrase a little too pessimistic (because I try to think that the best is yet to come), it may be true regarding my passion, typography. I'm too young (29) unfortunately, and this means I did not have the pleasure of being contemporary with maybe the man who has influenced my work the most (1). The man that showed that letters are more than just letters to be read. Herb Lubalin (1918-1981), also called sometimes as ‘the rule basher’ (2), smashed the taboos and sacred rules of type design and gave it personality. He rejected the functionalist philosophy of europeans in favor of an eclectic and exuberant style. To him, letters were not merely vessels of form, they were objects of meaning. (3). Nowadays, when looking at his portfolio, who dares to deny that the term ‘typography’ and ‘beauty’ may go hand-in-hand without any problem? Ed Benguiat, one of Herb’s partners, still likes making jokes with the phrase “screw legibility, type should be beautiful” and what I understand of this is not to forget the rules, but to know and break them carefully. In an era of pure eclecticism, we, the lovers of flourishes and swashes, can't do nothing but admire all the legacy that Lubalin, this wonderful type-guru, left. My font Lubaline read as “the line of Lubalin” is my humble tribute to him. Those who know his work, may see the influences easily like in his ‘Beards’ (1976) and ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965) posters; the art-deco forms in many of his amazing logos and practically in all his creations where letters seem to be alive just like you and me. I really hope that the future finds me still learning more and more about type-design and letterforms, and like him, always willing to make innovations in my field: Because letters are not just letters to be read. NOTES (1) These are some of my fonts in which some of Lubalin’s influences can be seen (in order of creation): Reina, Aire, Erotica, String, Beatle, Heroe, Selfie, Model, Seventies, and many others that are still in progress. (2) (3) Steven Heller. Herb Lubalin: Rule Basher. U&lc (1998) http://www.printmag.com/imprint/my-favorite-lubalin/

This typeface was designed specifically for producing movie posters, as well as VHS and DVD packaging for them. The uppercase letters are ultracondensed, and the lowercase letters are small caps, approximately a third the size of the uppercase. Also included are various logos and symbols suitable for the intended use, including those for MPAA ratings, and various audio and video formats. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

Trajan The original template for this one-weight, all-caps font was the inscription on Trajan’s Column, carved in AD 113 to celebrate the emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. College student Jason Smith copied the stone lettering from the cast on display in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. In Roman times, the signmaker would paint letters onto stone with a wide brush for the stone mason to chisel out later. The signwriter would end each stroke with a flick of his brush, which the mason would also carve into the stone. Ecce (as they would have said in Rome): the serif was born. Hand-crafted “I first drew this typeface when I was 17,” says Jason. “I drew it with a very sharp 9H pencil on polydraw film. “Then, using a Rotring pen, I inked the letters in and scraped back the serifs so they were perfectly sharp. These letters were then reduced on a PMT camera. I’d designed my first typeface, although it wasn’t digitised till much later.” Digitised Years after Jason had drawn the original typeface, its transfer into digital form made further refinements necessary. The serifs and weights needed thickening slightly, creating a crisp, new version whose delicate elegance is best appreciated in larger sizes. A classically-inspired font, timeless and perfectly-proportioned, to reflect the refinement of premium brands.

This font of Moon Type is modelled after Dr. Moon's original poster. He developed this embossed writing system to help those who have lost their sight later in life, and so are familiar with the shapes of English letters. Moon writing is still used, and you can find books written with it. This font only contains the letters and punctuation that are in the Moon Type system.

ITC Chivalry is a calligraphic hybrid that honors the tradition of combining Roman capitals with italic lowercase letters. Drawn by Missouri lettering artist Rob Leuschke, who used a flat-nib pen on textured watercolor stock and then converted the drawings into a digital font, the design combines an old world" feel with "new world" legibility. A companion set of black letter caps completes the suite of characters. "I've loved drawing letters for as long as I can remember," says Leuschke. "Even in kindergarten, I tried to draw letters like my teacher." After graduating from college, Leuschke worked for a short time at a sign company in St. Louis, and in the early 1980s began working at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City. His talent as a calligrapher and lettering artist eventually brought him back to St. Louis to begin a freelance career. Since then Leuschke has created over 250 fonts, primarily for the greeting card industry, that are now being used on work for his clients all over the world. Leuschke first conceived of the face as just the black letter caps; he later added the Roman letters to give the design more versatility. The Roman caps of ITC Chivalry combined with the lowercase are well suited to blocks of copy, while the more decorative black letter caps are ideal for showcasing short text of just a few words. Both sets of capitals also make great initial letters."

This Deco delight is based on logotype lettering for Crosley Radios from the 1930s. By aLtErNaTiNg upper and lowercase letters (brackets and braces, too), you can maintain the flow of the lightning bolts through the letters. Additionally, inline hyphens can be found at the ASCII circumflex and ASCII tilde positions. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

Morocco is a round, curvaceous font from Swiss designer Michael Parson. Many of the letterforms in Morocco are inspired by the Modern Greek alphabet. Five of the lowercase letters have additional ascenders/descenders that are not typical in the Roman alphabet (h, n, s, u, x). This experimentation continues into the uppercase as well; many capital letters in this font have been bequeathed with ascender or descender-like elements, and some capital letters, like the Q", only come up to the x-height of the lowercase letters. This experiment in type design is one of ten from Parson that has been included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH."

Newsreel Caps JNL is a novelty caps-only outline letter with cast shadow set inside film frames. Although the design idea itself is not new, this version is based on lettering from a vintage piece of sheet music for a song featured in the movie "Fox Movietone Follies". The font is a wink and nod to Fox's long-running newsreel series called "Fox Movietone News". The upper case keys have black letters on a white frame, while the lower case keys have white letters on a black frame. A blank white frame is on the period key; a blank black frame is on the comma key. Use this font for individual initials, set the characters loose for effect or set them tight (as provided) for a continuous film strip.

The origin of this font was a frieze in the RAF Chapel in Westminster Abbey which Michael Harvey was commissioned to design and create. It was comprised of the names of the top brass in wartime Bomber Command, namely Dowding, Harris, Newall, Tedder, Portal and Douglas. The Brief was to cut the letters in bronze and gild them. Instead, they were cut in perspex and gilded. To sit comfortably within the long and narrow vertical space available beneath the chapel’s stained glass window, extended letterforms were used with many vertical serifs omitted and with lengthened horizontal serifs. Some twenty years later, the missing upper-case letters were drawn together with the lowercase letters and Frieze, the font, was born. Subsequently, additional weights and styles were added to create a font family of six styles.

Four years in the making Rodeo Roundup is a very ornate script font where the letters look like a flowing rope with connecting lowercase letters. Due to the high amount of detail in this and other FontMesa fonts some applications may have difficulty displaying the letters larger than 100 point size.

Stripes is a caps only font and does not contain additional ligatures, because there is an easy way to create as many of them as you like. To form a ligature, convert your word or word string into vectors. Activate the corner points of the straight lines (not the round ones) of a letter and drag them over the next or the previous letter. This way you can create any ligature of your own. Beware of overkilling, it could decrease the legibility of your text. Besides the normal J, Stripes contains a stylistic alternate which should be used to avoid ugly gaps between critical letter pairs (see pdf document).

Bowling has letters on bowling pins. On the upper-case keys, the bowling pins are white with black letters and on the lower-case keys the pins are black with white letters. The lower-case letters can be colored and placed behind the upper-case letters to give two-color lettering. (The letters on the pins are from the typeface InsideLetters.)

Hand Of Sean was created from the designer's own handwriting in 2008 for a personal project, but was made available to the public and quickly became very popular. The font was updated in 2013 with redrawn glyphs, improved spacing, better kerning and OpenType features. NEW OpenType features: if you type two of the same letter, the font will automatically substitute with two slightly different characters to make the font look more natural. This also happens with words containing the same vowel either side of a consonant, such as ‘solo’ or ‘data’. Please note that OpenType features are only available in programs that support them, such as Illustrator, Indesign, Quark or Photoshop.

Inventory JNL is based on a "solid letter" stencil where you trace the body of the letter and fill in the top and bottom connecting lines to each character. This is another font in Jeff Levine's series of digital designs based on classic lettering stencil guides.

Call the lettering French Clarendon Condensed, call it circus lettering, wanted poster type or Old West letters, the style of this typeface is one of the most recognizable and evokes all of the above images and more. Tent Show JNL was re-drawn from examples of a vintage set of wood type, and contains all of the eccentricities that are present in these hand-routed classic letter forms.

Moore 003 was inspired by Henryk Tomaszewski's poster lettering for the Moore Exibition (Warsaw, Poland 1959). The headline "Moore" is composed of paper collage. The lettering, in Tomaszewski's vision, contrasts in ways that recall the contrast of Moore's sculptures. It was my intention to continue this research using lettering in the form of a typeface.

Compliments was inspired by a few hand-lettered words on a 1930s brochure by Western Union entitled “The Yellow Blank is Correct for Every Social Need.” It is now available in OpenType format with contextual alternates for a better script effect.

My handwriting with a speedmarker turned into a font - well, not really, to be honest! Personally I did do all the writing of letters, but in order for the letters to fit perfectly together, I manipulated them - just a tad! But the result is a hasty set of letters! When I say I wrote all the letters, I mean it literally!!! All letters are unique, meaning all the accented characters are unique! On top of that, Laxory comes with ligatures for both double lowercase letters and numbers! You will need to use OpenType supporting applications to use the autoligatures.

This cool techno font is easily recognizable with its quite unique stroke endings. I have increased the ascenders and descenders slightly (so they would work better with the new diacritic letters) and introduced a few alternate letterforms in addition to generally expanding the character set. A totally enjoyable reworking of an original design. Now also with a Bold and a brand new Light variant! Please note that these variants are made by adding/removing from the regular shape, so the letters no longer sits on the baseline. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

Look @ Me is a cartoonish, fancy font. Its special features are the different eyes of the capital letters. The letters literally have faces and who knows, probably they may talk to you... ;)

ROARRR! THE STYLES -Pantera Pro is the most complete style, and although its default look is mono-rhythmic it gets really playful and crazy like the examples of the posters by just activating the Decorative Ligatures button in the Open-type Panel of Adobe Illustrator. However, I recommend using also the Glyphs Panel because there you'll find much more variants per letter. Pantera Pro is in fact, coded in a way the combination of thicknesses will always look fantastic. -Pantera Black Left, and Pantera Black Right are actually “lite” versions of Pantera Pro: They have very little Open-Type code, so what you see here is what you get. Pantera Black Left has its left strokes thick, while Pantera Black Right has its right strokes thick. -Pantera White is a lovely member in this family that looks lighter and airy, hence its name. With the feature Standard Ligatures activated (liga) the font gets very playful. -Pantera Caps is based on sign painters lettering and since it follows the same pointed brush rules as the other styles, it matches perfectly. -Pantera Claws like its name suggests, is a set of icons that were done by our dear panther. THE STORY It is said that typography can never be as expressive as calligraphy, but sometimes it can get close enough. I tend to think that calligraphic trials, in order to work well as potential fonts, need first to go through very strict filters before going digital: While calligraphy is synonym of freedom (once its rules are mastered), type-design, in the other hand, has its battlefield a little tighter and tougher. When I practice pointed brush lettering, there are so many things happening on the paper. And most of them are delicious. The ones who know my work may see that although many of my fonts are very expressive, my handmade brush trials are much more lively than them. With that in mind, this time I tried to go further and rescue more of those things that are lost in the process of thinking type when first sketches are calligraphic. I wondered if I could create something wild, hence its name Panther, by understanding the randomness that sometimes calligraphy conveys and turning it to something systemic: With Pantera, I created an ordered disorder. Like it happens a lot in many kinds of lettering styles, in order to enrich the written word the scribe mixes the thickness of the strokes and the width of the letters. Like one of my favorite mentors say (1), they make thoughtful gestures Some lively strokes go down with a thick, while some do that with a thin. Some letters are very narrow, meaning some of them will need to be very wide to compensate. Why not?. The calligrapher is always thinking on the following letters, and he/she designs in his head the combination of thicks and thins before he/she executes them. He/she knows the playful rhythm the words will have before writing them. It takes time and skill to master this and achieve graceful results. Going back to the font, in Pantera, this combination of varying thicknesses and widths of letters were Open-Type coded so the user will see satisfactory results by just enabling or disabling some buttons on the glyphs panel. I'm very pleased with the result since it’s not very easy to find fonts which play with the words' rhythm like Pantera does, following of course, a strong calligraphic base. I believe that if you were on the prowl for innovative fonts, this is your chance to go wild and get Pantera! NOTES (1) Phrase by Yves Leterme. In fact, it’s the title of a book by him. EPILOGUE Esta fuente está dedicada a mi panterita

ITC Ironwork is the work of Serge Pichii, who was inspired by a piece of decorative lettering done by Jan Tschichold in the early 1920s. Tschichold had interlocked a series of rough sans serif letters and embellished them with scattered decorative elements. The original was of only capital letters, touching and overlapping like an ironwork gate made of letters. Pichii completed the typeface with lowercase forms and smoothed the edges. The scrolls of the capitals were extended to the lowercase and Pichii based them on iron scrollwork he found in Vienna and Prague. A lot of attention was paid to the elements of the typeface in order to 'smooth out' and balance proportional relations between the elements," says Pichii. ITC Ironwork is great for signage and display but also works well in short texts."

Enotria is a contemporary neo-grotesk typefaces inspired by the Swiss school but with a Calabrian’s soul (south Italy region). It is composed by 8 weights and 7 widths for 112 styles with also 4 stylistic set for the letters, 2 stylistic set for numbers, 1 more stylistic set for symbols and punctuations, for three languages scripts. Enotria sports elegant 8° italic angle and a lot of adjustment between the letters for a better legibility as well as true fractions, ordinals, tabular and old style figures, numerators and denominators. Enotria typefamily is more then a typeface, it is a huge design and typographic system, flexible and suitable for any occasion.

Komu is the revival of a style of letters frequently used on billboards during the socialist period in the former Czechoslovakia. These were usually uppercase letters made of paper and covered with a layer of aluminum foil. People just had to pick the letters (that included a variety of widths and sizes) out from a box and pin them up on a styrofoam billboard, thus making it easy to announce any event. Komu consists of two styles. Version A is rather squarish and includes some weird characters (K, 5, narrow E, strange diacritics) while version B is more rounded with most letters equally wide (with the exception of E, F and L, which look really wide next to the rest). The optical disparity of the original letters was kept, so that some of them look slightly darker than the others. Komu is intended to be used on posters, books and other products about Socialism in our region and includes full support for languages based on latin script.

The Wright-Regan Instrument Company (Wrico) was one of the leading manufacturers of lettering templates for many years. Aside from their own line of products, they also did custom manufacturing. A series of lettering guides called “Mimeostyle” for the A. B. Dick Company of Chicago (produced for use in making mimeograph machine printing stencils) featured an art Deco squared letter design with rounded corners. This is now available digitally as Template Sans JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Valentine Moon is a unique and beautiful font. This font is decorated with natural letters and is very unique. Not only that, the decorations on the letters are also specially designed so that they are very easy to use. This font is perfect for Valentine's, weddings, invitations, birthdays, promotions, promotions on social media, product promotion, beauty, logos, branding, banners, posters, typography.

Morthern is inspired by the work of charming lettering artists with a combination of Old Style Display Bold. Each letter is modified so that the distance, width and weight can give the beauty of the alternates given. A passionate curve gives a touch of beauty to this font. With both weights you have two different shapes in terms of uppercase letters that aim to distinguish between title of the letter and the paragraph.

Syntax was designed by Swiss typographer Hans Eduard Meier, and issued in 1968 by the D. Stempel AG type foundry as their last hot metal type family. Meier used an unusual rationale in the design of this sans serif typeface; it has the shapes of humanist letters or oldstyle types (such as Sabon), but with a modified monoline treatment. The original drawings were done in 1954; first by writing the letters with a brush, then redrawing their essential linear forms, and finally adding balanced amounts of weight to the skeletons to produce optically monoline letterforms. Meier wanted to subtly express the rhythmical dynamism of written letters and at the same time produce a legible sans serif typeface. This theme was supported by using a very slight slope in the roman, tall ascenders, terminals at right angles to stroke direction, caps with classical proportions, and the humanist style a and g. The original foundry metal type was digitized in 1989 to make this family of four romans and one italic. Meier completely reworked Syntax in 2000, completing an expanded and improved font family that is available exclusively from Linotype GmbH as Linotype Syntax. In 2009 the typeface family was renamed into a more logical naming of "Syntax Next" to fit better in the Platinum Collection naming." Syntax® Next font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Our Bazaruto family was inspired by an old fashioned specimen from “Letters and Lettering” by Carlyle & Oring, but you'll find the inspiration has been greatly expounded upon. What began as an all Capitals specimen has been fleshed out to an extended full character set with many features and variants from the original design. Bazaruto has been an exercise in typographic evolution. The original Art Deco style spawned an Engraved version, then a Bodoni-esque text style, and then a monoline version of that text style (both of the latter complete with Obliques). But after that is when the real interpretations of form began with the development of the Iron fonts, playing off the original specimen having a visual flavor of wrought ironwork in them, and blending that into the Bodoni-esque typestyles. Lastly, a fast and loose hand drawn version of the Iron fonts and an ornaments font were created to add more variety and spunk to the family. The Bazaruto family is a visual grab bag of styles which all have an underlying harmony.

When master letterer Hugh Gordon and his student, Ross F. George developed a set of lettering pens between June 16, 1913 and Sept. 1, 1914, they had no idea that their invention (which they named Speed-Ball®) would still be in use nearly a hundred years later. The C. Howard Hunt pen company [originally of Camden, New Jersey] became the original (and sole) distributor of these pens. By 1915 an instructional booklet entitled "Modern Pen Lettering" was produced, and it was copiously illustrated with examples of layouts, lettering techniques and an assortment of alphabets for the user to learn. Nouveau Poster JNL is Jeff Levine's interpretation of a sanserif design found within the pages of this vintage publication.

Theater District JNL revisits the classic lettering of the 1930s Art Deco movement with this bold headline type. While many variations of this letter form exist, each interpretation evokes the approach to modernism and streamline embraced by architects and fashion designers of the period.

A vintage lettering stencil manufactured by the E-Z Letter Stencil Company of Baltimore, Maryland was the model for Schoolyard Stencil JNL, available in both regular and oblique versions. Re-drawn digitally and following the actual bend of the steel rule dies used to cut the stencils, this typeface has not been cleaned up from its original design. Upon close examination, you will find straight angles and slight curves in the most unusual places. This was representative of the difficult work involved in bending steel cutting rule material and fitting it into small areas. For many years, E-Z Letter was the main competitor to the Stenso Lettering Company; the originator of the oil board stencil lettering guide complete with automatic spacing holes. Anyone over 40 will well-remember lettering their science fair posters, report covers and ring binders with these stencils.

From a few hand drawn letters seen on a poster from 1939 you may find this font familiar. Miss Scarlett resembles the Gone With The Wind poster lettering.

JetJaneButton has letters on a design that looks like a computer button. Its letters are from JetJane Mono, a sans-serif monospaced font. The typeface contains characters that can add color to letters. There are two ways to do this. One uses layers and the other a combination of characters, some with zero width. This pdf file explains the how this can be done.

Introducing a clean script font named Coral Reef. This smooth font is perfect for lettering with alternates for small letters (for the last letter for example) and multilingual support.

Caltic-Holiday, Caltic-Festival, and Caltic-Straight are three eye-catching, very bold typefaces that are suitable for posters and signage. Caltic-Holiday and Caltic-Festival base letter shapes on trapezoids with curved sides but with curves that are reversed going from one to the other. Caltic-Straight has letters based on trapezoids with straight sides. None are suited for text and with their built-in spacing will not work as all upper-case or all lower-case. All three come in two widths, regular and wide, giving the Caltic family six members. Caltic has nothing to do with Celts. The Calt refers to the calt or contextual alternative OpenType feature that makes this typeface work. When the letters on the upper-case keys alternate with the letters on the lower-case keys, they fit snuggly together. As long as the user has a word processor that supports the contextual alternatives feature, there is no need for the user to alternate letters; the calt feature does it automatically. Although the fonts seem similar to hand-drawn lettering that was done on posters and signs during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, I can find nothing quite like them. My inspiration for them is older, in a newspaper from 1932 that led to the typeface family PoultySign. Caltic (and Lentzers) are the result of seeing what else I could do with the inspiration that sprang from that 1932 newspaper.

Presidio is a stylized version of the hand-lettered calligraphy typical of the Mission era of early California. This lettering was often unique to an individual hand, but the characters shared a common style, and had their roots in the Middle Ages when monks and scholars copied whole books one letter at a time. "Presidio" replicates this style with subtle variations in each character, giving the font its authentic charm.

Old Kharkiv was inspired by the first half of the 20th century photo with a signage on the building of the Ivan Kotlyarevsky Kharkiv National University of Arts. During the development, the font has acquired unique features not from the original signage, for example, drops in uppercase were replaced with sharp serifs. This font contains the letters of all the main European languages, Cyrillic and basic special characters. Some uppercase letters (where allowed their form) have decorative elements (swashes) to use them as drop caps or initials. There are stylistic alternatives for some Ukrainian letters. Also, as a bonus, this font contains up to a dozen graphic elements that you can use in your layout.