Willow is an Adobe Originals typeface designed in 1990 by Joy Redick for the Adobe Wood Type series. Willow is a condensed typeface modeled on nineteenth-century wood types known as Clarendons (wood type Clarendons do not resemble the English metal types of that name). Clarendon condensed faces were originally so well-designed that words or a line of display type have an even color that is remarkable for wood types. Taken from proofs of type in the Rob Roy Kelly Collection housed at the University of Texas at Austin, Willow can be used for display work such packaging, advertising, and posters.

A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, for large display. Lowercase not designed for this type.

Typoskript AR is based on a metal type which was produced in 1968 by VEB Typoart, Dresden, from a design of the German calligrapher and lettering artist Hildegard Korger. It bears all the qualities of the artist’s inimitable style which will be immediately recognizable to anyone who’s familiar with her Handbook of Type and Lettering (Lund Humphries, 1992) (Schrift und Schreiben, Leipzig, Fachbuchverlag, 1971). The ARTypes transcription retains the roughness of the artist’s pen on paper as it was featured in the original type, as well as the letterfit, ch, ck and f-ligatures. ARTypes have supplied the font with all the standard accents, monetary signs, etc. The original qu logotype is provided as an alternative letter. A printable .pdf specimen of the type can be downloaded from the gallery.

This popular type was manufactured by the Crescent Type Foundry of Chicago and sold on their behalf by a half dozen other foundries. Introduced in the early 1890s, just as tastes were swinging away from the excesses of the Victorian period.

Introduced by the American Type Founders Co. at the time of the Spanish American War and advertised as suitable for "War Scare Headlines"! Used by many papers for years after because the narrow type was suitable for narrow single column heads.

A heavy blackletter; Rudolf Koch’s first type from 1909. On an old page full of type specimen from the 1930s, the type is described as ”Schwabacher (used by the Deutsche Reichsbahn [German Imperial Railway]).“ As a matter of fact, it is the first print of the Offenbach script master Rudolf Koch, who came out with this typeface in 1909. At that time, it was given the name ”Neudeutsch“ (New German). Later, it became very popular under the name Koch-Schrift, and was at times the official typeface of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German Imperial Railway).

Lunga is a wonderful condensed font. It was designed to be a legible type. It has lots of decorative glyphs and ligatures which were possible thanks to the open-type format! Lunga Real Ligada is the most complete style. The Open Type format contains all the ligatures and alternates. It also contains the SMALLCAPS function. Lunga Exacta has the right quantity of glyphs. The necessary ones if you are not a ligature lover. Lunga Versalita is a SMALLCAPS font. These glyphs are also contained in Lunga Real Ligada. Lunga Extras shows some ligatures and alternates which are actually contained in Lunga Real Ligada thanks to the Open Type format.

Linotype Boberia is part of the Take Type Library, which features winners of Linotype’s International Digital Type Design Contest. Designed by Bo Berndal, its historical roots lie in the neoclassicism of the turn of the 20th century. The slender letters with a large x-height and marked stroke contrast give the font an elegant character. The nostalgic, flowing forms are typical of Art Deco fonts and allow designers a number of possibilities for the font’s use. Boberia includes regular, italic and bold type styles.

Camelot was the first of over 100 typefaces designed by Frederic Goudy. The upper case characters were drawn in 1896 for the Dickinson Type Foundry. Goudy was so encouraged by his check for $10 (double what he asked for the drawings), that he spent the next 50 years designing type. The lower case was added by the Dickinson foundry. This Lanston digital release includes a Text version based on the smaller point sizes of the metal type and a Display version based on the larger sizes. The two appear different in size but share the exact same line weight when at the same point size.

Monotype’s hot metal Bell series from 1931 was based on original types made by the punchcutter Richard Austin for the foundry of John Bell in the 1780s. The different sizes of Monotype’s series were not all based on the same model. As type historian James Mosley wrote on Typophile, “For 18 point and above (the metal type was cut in sizes up to 36 point) Monotype’s model was a larger type [than the model used for the text sizes], the ‘Great Primer’ cut by Austin. This has greater contrast in the capitals and a flat foot to letter a.” The digital Bell closely follows the design of the hot metal 18pt version, and is therefore somewhat lighter in color than the text sizes of Monotype’s original metal face. James Mosley’s Typophile article can be found here.

A set of vintage wood type printing blocks yielded the alphabet which was to become Chamfer Serif JNL. With its heavy vertical serifs and interesting character shapes, the design is unique when compared to the more familiar wood type offerings of the past.

FDI Triumph revives Albert Auspurg’s “Triumph” typeface originally released in 1929 by the type foundry Ludwig Wagner in Leipzig. The forgotten design was carefully digitized from the original wood type font and extended to cover the Western codepages Win 1252 and Mac Roman.

Garstang Engraved is the latest in Greater Albion's series of ‘wood type’ inspired fonts. Garstang Engraved is a hand-cut Roman, suggesting the late Victorian era, but the type of thing that continued in use well into the twentieth century. If you want a title face that has versatility and suggests a past history, as well as the art of finely cut wood type, then this is it!

In the 19th century typefaces with star-like serifs developed from the medieval type styles, retaining the sharp corners and peaks of some of the blackletter types but losing the flourishes on the upper-case letters. Asterx is in that tradition of star-footed typefaces, though it is not modeled on any particular one.

Align Vertical Mono has an innovator construction which gives to the designer the ability to align the letters creating beautiful patterns on the page. It was design by the Tyner (typography Designer) Pedro Mascarenhas to fill a gap in type design. With Align Mono Family type will be the leading role of the design. The final result of the art work depends of the choices designer makes for each glyph.

Linotype Lichtwerk, from German designer Bernd Pfannkuchen, is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the entries of the Linotype-sponsored International Digital Type Design Contest 1999 for inclusion on the Take Type 3 CD. This display font contains very narrow forms with a high x-height. It is reminiscent of the constructivism of the 1920s and was designed with a small number of basic forms. The high, thin letters form words and an overall picture which almost flickers on the page. Linotype Lichtwerk with its technical look is suited exclusively for headlines.

The letters in this font are made by chopping bits from footprints. Individual letters are sometimes very hard to decipher, but when put together as words they are usually readable. In Pedestrisan-Regular, the original version of this font, the upper-case letters have toes on the top the lower case letters have toes on the bottom. All the feet with letters are right feet. The upper case and lower case do not mix. In 2020 two alternate versions were created. In Pedestrian-Alt all toes are on the top but the lower-case letters are left feet. In Pedestrian-AltTwo all toes are on the bottom with the upper-case letters being cut from left feet and the lower case from right feet. Both the alternate styles also have an alternate set of numbers on the unicode circled numbers that can also be accessed with an OpenType feature.

The lifetime of Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492) coincides with the rise of metal type as it displaced broad pen calligraphy for the production of books. This revolution marked the end of formal Western calligraphy, as the industry employed metalworkers who designed type according to geometric measurement while calligraphers were forced to become secretaries who practiced handwriting systems. Renaissance Florence should have witnessed the marriage of calligraphy and typography, just as all the other arts and sciences flourished as classical learning was applied to technical advances; but the metalworkers and geometricians measured, dissected and recast the calligraphic letters by crude indirect methods, and in the end took all the life out of them. Here they languished until digital type has made it possible to render the precise motion of the broad pen stroke into type. Lorenzo is a confluence of many strains from the Middle Ages, brought together within the classical harmony of the capitals. It attempts to bypass metal type, using calligraphic means to achieve the precision of type while retaining the life of the stroke: a classical font that would be familiar to Lorenzo himself as well as to the modern eye. The Lorenzo family comes in four weights, ranging from light to bold. Two sets of italics, one with swashed caps and ascenders, complement each weight. The family boasts extensive language support and an offering of over fifty calligraphic ornaments/flourishes included within the character set.

Tuzonie imitates misprinted or degraded and distressed type. It especially imitates type where the outline has only small imperfections, (which at smaller sizes might even appear fairly-well defined) but where the imperfections in the interior of the letter shapes are more obvious and frequent.

This font began life as a metal type called Duerer, from the Boston Type Foundry about 1890. A wood type maker copied it, and that's where we got it (in Guadalajara, Mexico, already! Some people travel to see the sights; we travel to collect type.)

Found within the pages of the 1934 edition of the American Type Foundry’s “Book of American Type” is a sans serif design with rounded terminals that emulates a typewriter face. “Jumbo Typewriter” is reminiscent of the type of lettering formerly found on teletype news copy. “Teletype” was a division of Western Electric (part of AT&T), and the machines utilized telephone lines to electronically type and send (as well as receive) messages worldwide. Many folks will remember the sound of teletype machines in the background when radio stations had their news breaks. Now available digitally as News Copy JNL, it is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Bohemian Modern slab stencil display font Black–Out is a result of three things: the need for a distinctive ultra-black display typeface, an admiration for slab-serifs and Clarendons, and the love of systematic stencil type. Fusing all the desires together resulted in Black–Out. What was the inspiration for designing the font? Slab serifs + Clarendons + systematic stencil type = Black-Out! What are its main characteristics and features? It is a massive chunk of type, contemporary in nature while also harking back to the sun-drenched Modernism of California of the 1970s. Usage recommendations: Display type for use in materials that are meant to evoke a range of emotions.

A long lost Art Nouveau wood type from the Hamilton Museum Collection evokes the excesses of Victorian design and the equally quirky 1960s Psychedelic era revival of the Victorian type styles. Free flowing organic designs that flourished with Art Nouveau in the late 1800s were directly referenced and further distorted with with phototype in the late 1960s. This design, known as Arabesque, was produced by the Morgans & Wilcox Co. and the Wm. Page Co. as almost identical designs. Both manufacturers were acquired by Hamilton and offered briefly by Hamilton as design #618. This curious wood type defies most of the basic tenets of type design and what comes to mind when one thinks "wood type". Many characters have a lively eccentricity that were all left true to the original design. Additional characters were designed to fill out the standard range of characters found in digital fonts. This font includes over 280 characters for full unicode support of Western and Central European Latin characters.

Sporting broad, unadorned caps and just a dash of flair, ATF Wedding Gothic is like an engravers gothic at a black tie affair. It comes from the same tradition as other social gothics from the turn of the twentieth century, such as Engravers gothic and Copperplate. But where these are the faces of business cards and common announcements, ATF Wedding Gothic is a special occasion. Its swaying ‘R’ and ‘Q’, its characterful figures, and spritely-yet-sturdy insouciance make ATF Wedding Gothic well suited for tasteful engagements of all sorts. Yet there is much more here than the name implies. Originally offered long ago as metal type in a single, wide weight, this digital interpretation expands what was once a novelty design into a surprisingly versatile family of nine weights. An additional, narrower, standard width brings the count to eighteen fonts. From Thin to Medium, ATF Wedding Gothic retains the airy elegance of its source, while the heavier side of the family takes on an altogether different feel, more reminiscent of wooden poster type.

The hand lettering found on a small catalog sheet for decorative decals from the 1930s-1940s era was the perfect source material for Crestview Six JNL. Handmade typefaces or signage from past decades offer a wonderfully humanistic change from the perfectly-crafted designs of printer's type (or digital type in the modern era). The font's name comes from the old alpha-numerical phone exchanges of the past.

Chuck. Designed in 2004 by Jim Parkinson. Originally released as a Type 1 font, Chuck was refreshed (version2) and re-released as simple Open Type in 2012. The models for this massive Deco typeface appear on a bronze plaque on the South Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. The plaque commemorates the builders of the bridge.

Woodbranch JNL is a solid version of the 2013 font release Woodlawn JNL. The design was originally based on examples of an outline (open face) wood type. This interpretation takes on newer, stronger characteristics as a bold typeface when the "inner letters" of the original alphabet were removed, yet the imperfection of the wood type pieces are still maintained.

Mekanik font is the work of British artist David Quay and as the name suggests, this geometric typeface reflects the simplicity of mechanical sans serif type design. It is an echo of the type styles developed by the Soviet Constructivists in the early 1920s. Mekanik font is excellent for use where a feeling of precision and strength is desired.

In 1938 the Frankfurt-based foundry Ludwig & Mayer released Eugen Weiss’ beautiful fraktur ‚Hoelderlin‘. Carefully redrawn and redesigned, this digitized version is intended to add another gem to the enthusiasts’ treasure drove of blackletter types. The font contains the historical long s which can be reached by the OpenType feature historical forms or by typing the integral sign [ ∫ ].

The Venus type family is a historic hot metal face with left slanted weights that is used for the german cartographic map production. There are also special typefaces required like the Roemisch and Topografische Zahlentafel type family."

A circa 1900 type from the foundry of W. Grauneau, Berlin. A great utility face as it works well as the "plain" face with other decorative type of the same era. Reads well in paragraphs of copy.

The Venus type family is a historic hot metal face with left slanted weights that is used for the german cartographic map production. There are also special typefaces required like the Roemisch and Topografische Zahlentafel type family."

Linotype Mhai Thaipe is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the entries of the Linotype-sponsored International Digital Type Design Contests of 1994 and 1997. The work of German designer Markus Remscheid, the name is not hard to recognize as an English-Asian play on my type and describes its general character. The small circles which ornament the alphabet and the unusual flowing forms which look like a mixture of Arabic and Sanskrit combine to give the typeface an ornamental, exotic look. Linotype Mhai Thaipe is best used for headlines with point sizes of 12 or larger.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.

Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) was called the King of Printers; he was a prolific type designer, a masterful engraver of punches and the most widely admired printer of his time. His books and typefaces were created during the 45 years he was the director of the fine press and publishing house of the Duke of Parma in Italy. He produced the best of what are known as modern" style types, basing them on the finest writing of his time. Modern types represented the ultimate typographic development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They have characteristics quite different from the types that preceded them; such as extreme vertical stress, fine hairlines contrasted by bold main strokes, and very subtle, almost non-existent bracketing of sharply defined hairline serifs. Bodoni saw this style as beautiful and harmonious-the natural result of writing done with a well-cut pen, and the look was fashionable and admired. Other punchcutters, such as the Didot family (1689-1853) in France, and J. E. Walbaum (1768-1839) in Germany made their own versions of the modern faces. Even though some nineteenth century critics turned up their noses and called such types shattering and chilly, today the Bodoni moderns are seen in much the same light as they were in his own time. When used with care, the Bodoni types are both romantic and elegant, with a presence that adds tasteful sparkle to headlines and advertising. This version of Bodoni was done by Morris Fuller Benton for American Typefounders between 1907 and 1911. Although some of the finer details of the original Bodoni types are missing, this family has the high contrast and vertical stress typical of modern types. It works well for headlines, logos, advertising, and text."

Pill Gothic walks the tightrope between a heads down, hard working, utilitarian sans and something that stands out, saying, "Look at me!" Designers looking for a type that will work in blocks of text for callouts, captions and headlines will find that unique balance with Pill. Pill Gothic asks the question: what is the effect of a few truly unique characters on the meaning of a type? In particular, the 'a' and the 'g', while relating strongly to the forms of the other characters, stand out from the traditional milieu of sans serif types. The name Pill Gothic came from early studies of the condensed weight where the lower case characters had the shape of a pill capsule.

American Type Founders released the pattern for this typeface under the name "Thermotype". In the days of cast-metal foundry type, copyfitting headlines could prove problemmatic at times; this typeface, with a wide uppercase and narrower lowercase of exactly the same “color”, allowed stacked lines of type to be composed with uniform width. Clean, crisp and practical. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).