The Vtg Stencil fonts from astype are based on real world stencils from several countries. The Vtg Stencil Marsh design was derived from 1 inch stencils, cut by a Marsh R machine. Marsh produced stencil machines since 1922 and was one of the most important manufacturers for such marking machines. The design is part of the American industrial heritage. PDF Specimen

At the apex of the 1960s-70s Hippie movement, San Franscisco's Haight-Ashbury district was the epicenter of the Love Generation, and the Fillmore (East and West) were the city's musical venues. Inspired by a 1970 concert poster, the Art Nouveau influence was strongly felt in the hand lettering from that poster, which is the basis for Flower Children JNL.

This font started life in 1893 at the Boston Type Foundry, but was also cast at the Central Type Foundry. Both were members of the ATF combine formed in 1892. Like so many interesting fonts of its day, it was issued without a lowercase, limiting its use to display headlines. Sometime in the early 1990s, we designed a lowercase to go with it.

Transistor is a decorative and electronic serif typeface. One of the historical connection was the Didot, development in French. Transistor typeface was designed from the concept and experimentation with electronic circuits. The main typographic proportion are connected with the modern typeface, like Didot where the letterforms are inspired from the point nib pen design approach but also with electronic type style letterforms.

Let's say a San Francisco punk group used letters from a theatre marquee to create a flyer in 1979 for one of their shows. Then the flyer showed up in the background of a newspaper photograph, and the photo, twenty-five years later, was enlarged and the lettering on the flyer was turned into a font. Santa Mensch has arrived.

Coquillage is French for seashell or shellfish. Since I’m going to France this year for a camping holiday with my family, I thought it was a good idea to give this charming connected script a ‘holiday name’! Coquillage was handmade with a Japanese pen. It is a lovely connected script and comes with double-letter ligatures and a full range of diacritics.

Conveyor Belt was designed for an environmental paper made from sugar cane waste called bagasse. The paper mill use conveyor belts to produce the paper from when the bagasse gets loaded to the finished paper product. This was the inspiration for this font. It has some alternatives to give options for different words linking different letters. This is a moving font and flowing.

Cycles was designed for use in books and other publications with lengthy texts and/or complex typography using different sizes of type. Different versions of Cycles have been designed which are optimized for setting at specific point sizes as was the practice in the days of metal type. Together with Stone Print, SFPL, and Arepo it makes up a superfamily of typefaces.

This jaunty display face was discovered in one of the many books on sign writing produced by Eric Matthews. The work was signed “King Cole", hence the font’s name. This typeface’s large x-height and tight spacing make it highly suitable for attention-grabbing headlines. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

Shortly after the creation of Chauncy Deluxxe, Chank realized that he needed a condensed font to go with the regular version of his handwriting. The solution was Coffeedance, a fun, light, dancing, dandy handmade font. Makes me think of frozen treats as the lines wiggle a bit like they’re shivering. Brrrr. Coffeedance was Chank’s Font of the Month for November 1998.

This font was called differently when I started out building it, but after a long and insightful conversation with a good friend, I decided to call it Nebulous Promise. Nebulous Promise was made using a broken satay skewer (I like using those!) and Chinese ink. It comes with a full set of alternates for the lower case letters and extensive language support.

The typeface was designed at the Polygraphmash type design bureau in 1951-53 by Lev Malanov, Elena Tsaregorodtseva et al. Based on Cyrillic version of Excelsior, 1931, of Mergenthaler Linotype, by Chauncey H. Griffith. Excelcior Cyrillic was developed in 1936 in Moscow by Professor Michael Shchelkunov, Nikolay Kudryashev et al. A low-contrast text face of the Ionic – "Legibility" group.

Iowan Old Style was designed for Bitstream in 1990 by noted sign painter John Downer. Iowan Old Style is a hardy contemporary text design modeled after earlier revivals of Jenson and Griffo typefaces but with a larger x-height, tighter letterfit, and reproportioned capitals. Cyrillic letters were designed by Natalia Vasilyeva in 2016. Iowan Old Style Cyrillic was released by Paratype in 2017.

Introducing Sokinz. Sokinz was round shapes, funky and playfull fonts, made carefully with handdrawn by combining two concepts of graffity style and groovy styles, you can use this font for your creative design, this font was suitable to make posters, pamflets, t-shirt, merch, apparels, brand names, gift cards, products tags, and many more can be discovered by using this fonts.

SUSHI is an unusual font family (2 styles), created by Bartosz Panek. The idea was created while working on the design of a certain logo. With time, a whole font was created from modular elements, which in its form brings associations with food, fish and sushi. The font contains uppercase characters, numerals and a large range of punctuation (over 220 glyphs).

Introducing the elegant new Somersette Monoline Script Font! If you are needing a touch of casual chic calligraphy for your designs, this font was created for you! Somersette was built with OpenType features and includes beginning and ending swashes, alternate characters for both lowercase and uppercase letters, loads of different swash alternates for lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, alternates, and ligatures. Over 500 glyphs!

Metropolis Bold was commissioned by Publish magazine for their 1990 redesign. Although other digital versions exist, I think this was the first one and is characterized by extremely pointy serifs. It is well to remember in laying out copy for Metropolis to allow plenty of white space in the layout. Metropolis is based on the 1932 Stempel cut as designed by W. Schwerdtner.

Type books and lettering manuals of the 1900s were resplendent with examples of chamfered type faces, as this was a popular and simple style of lettering that was easy to reproduce with little effort. Poster Chamfer JNL is one such example taken from one of these turn-of-the-century publications that exemplifies the style as a condensed version of the letters.

Arcadian was first produced in wood type around 1870 by William H. Page & Company. It is a semi-ornamented face based on a French Clarendon, with dots added to the median and the tops and bottoms of the letters. It has a distinctly “Old West” feel, and was likely used to add a little pizzazz to advertising and broadsides of the time.

The Pictographs MT font was contains over 700 emoji icons (emoticons). These symbols, pictures and images cover a range of expressions and uses. Emoji were very popularized in Japan and have become widely adopted and integrated into the Unicode specification. The Pictographs MT font was created to support messaging applications, and to give designers and developers a robust set of emoticons.

A friend once jokingly told me that what I really do is mine extinct arts for parts to use in modern things, like going to the scrapyard to pick up bumpers, quarter-panels and dashboards off of Datsuns and Ponies to build a shiny new Ferrari. I still kind of grin at that, but I certainly do spend a lot of time looking at old things and imagining ways they would work today. This shiny new Ferrari here is called Bibliophile, and it contains scrap heap parts from various pages by Louis Prang, the Prussian-American printer and publisher who inspired my Prangs fonts. This is my second engagement with the late 19th century man, and it’s quite a bit more intricate than just an italic Didone with a connected lowercase. Bibliophile marries Round Hand calligraphy with Italian capitals, two styles not often relayed in the same alphabet, but work together beautifully when combined well. When you combine them well with a few long-practised tricks of the trade, then mix in a few trusted features from my previous work over the years, you get my usual crazy exuberance, like 17 different shapes for the d, 21 different forms for the y, endings, beginnings, swashes, ornaments, and so on. It’s no secret that I can get carried away when I’m so consumed by an idea. — Bibliophile comes in 2 weights, each of them with over 900 glyphs covering all the latin languages. Bibliophile also comes with a bold weight, something I’m always reluctant to do with something as adventurous and complex as the structure of this historical mashup. But I couldn’t chase away the idea of increasing the contrast while maintaining the hairlines in a lowercase this narrow. Part of it was the curiosity about the outcome, and part was the sheer challenge of it. I think it turned out OK. Words set in either weight will show delicateness and elegance, and the more time you spend inside the font and micro-manage the setting, the more ways you will find to magnify either. Bibliophile can be as muted or luxurious as you want it to be. This is the kind of alphabet that fits well in fashion marketing and high-end packaging, from the very subdued to the super-exquisite. Enjoy the gleaming new vehicle made with freshly polished old parts.

The Vtg Stencil fonts from astype are based on real world stencils from several countries. The US No. 4 design was derived from a typical antique US-American stencil-plate. This revolving stencil-plate was invented by Eugene L. Tarbox and patented in 1868. It was a mass factored product and a very common tool in the United States until the success of the interlocking stencils. In case of US No. 4 an original early stencil plate from New York Stencil Works was used. The Regular font style is a clean font design featuring an extended Latin glyph set including some typical stencil ornaments and tabular figures. The Paint font style is made from true stenciled letters and features all the letters of the stencil-plate only. If you like the later interlocking design have a look to my Vtg Stencil US No.2 font. More info: pdf specimen

For many years I had repeatedly written names on certificates or designed texts for certificates of honor with a pen. I later digitized a font written with a broad pen from 1988 to make it easier to use. After the technical possibilities for this had developed, I made a PostScript font out of this document font. The "HGB-Unik" is a humanistic antiqua that arose from this written type. In 2009 Unik was chosen as the text font for a book. However, the book designers wanted to have an italic and a bold style as well. The cursive was developed from written texts that I also wrote for various occasions in the 1980s. The resulting font family was thoroughly revised several times until a usable text font with four weights was created. Although the Unik looks very idiosyncratic in display size, it shows a surprisingly balanced, pleasant typeface in read size.

The first plain weight of Cutoff was designed in 2005 to be used in Miele, an independent Italian free magazine. The need was for an elegant, unusual and legible semi-serif with contemporary flavour. I was fascinated by the deconstructivist work of Jeff Keedy (Hard Times Thick), Phil Baines (Can You, You Can) and Otl Aicher (Rotis), so my aim was to get the feeling of a cut transitional typeface; at the same time felt the exigence to work on the whole shape of the glyphs, in order to soften the “90s deconstructivist” effect and obtain a more balanced and readable design. In the last years I further worked on the typeface adding the other styles, extending the character set and refining the letterforms. Finally the precious collaboration with URW++ brought in 2010 to a complete OpenType Pro font family, with multilingual and advanced typographic features. Fulvio Bisca, July 2010

Calluna was born more or less by accident. When I needed a little break from designing Museo I was just fiddling around a bit to see if maybe a full slab serif would be something to have a look at. The first thing I did, of course, was to put slab serifs on the stems of Museo. When I did, something nice happened. Slab-serifs with a direction! I ended up using the idea for something I always wanted to do: making a rather serious text face. The goal was to make a text font, but one with enough interesting details. In the end it all came down to finding the balance in a typeface between the robustness needed to function as a text face and enough refinement to look good as a display font. Check out Calluna Sans™ which is a great pair for Calluna™.

So the lumber was cheap - just a pile of offcuts - and so was the carpenter… And you couldn't say he was exactly lazy, but he was certainly efficient… mostly he would just cut a couple of planks to size, slice off a corner now and then, once in a blue moon hash up a curve… I guess he didn't have a drill, cos there are no holes… and he sure as hell didn't have a ruler… But he did have some kind of an eye, and until it falls off the wall it'll look pretty OK… Ply comes in six styles, offering differing degrees of neatness and adorned or not with fixings… There are money-saving packages too… It’s uppercase only, with variations between upper and lower case, and OpenType types can switch on Stylistic Set 1 to take the effort out of keeping things varied…

ITC Wisteria was designed by Michael Stacey, a Florida-based artist and graphic designer. An ardent collector and recycler of vintage graphic design and typography, Stacey is especially intrigued by the lettering styles of sign painters and show-card lettering artists from the days when most display typography was hand-rendered. ITC Wisteria is one such style, taken from the 1930s, which he has updated for digital imaging. His goal was to retain the loose, casual feel of handlettering, while imparting what he calls “the crisp finish of current precision typography.” Like the plant it was named after, ITC Wisteria is both rugged and beautiful. The design is a constructed brush script that successfully melds the strength and dynamism of strong character shapes with the grace of script letterforms. The split-brush strokes, although obviously constructed, also impart a sense of immediacy to the design.

P22 Curwen was originally designed by an unknown designer. This version was created by Colin Kahn. P22 Curwen Poster is a digitized version of a rare wood type used by the Curwen Press in England in the early 20th Century for poster work. The font was known to have been cut in 6 sizes—from 3-line (3/4 inch) to 16-line (3 inch) in height. The font was based from impressions made of the 6-line type. P22 Curwen Maxima is a hyper-stylized re-interpretation of Curwen Poster by Colin Kahn. As a post-modern poster type, it evokes an organic nature within a novel maximalist framework. It is reminiscent of early phototype display faces with an illogical three-dimensionality which serves to give the font continuity. The capitals are buried beneath stylistic wood shavings complementing the sculpture like quality of the lowercase. Perfect for (almost) any project.

Neuzeit Grotesk was originally designed by Wilhelm Pischner (1904-1989) and was released by the font foundry D. Stempel in 1928-1939. In 1970, the German Standards Committee advised the standard use of Neuzeit-Grotesk for official signage and traffic directional systems, and the abbreviation DIN was added to the name of the font. DIN" stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung (The German Institute for Industrial Standards). Neuzeit Grotesk was also once the standard in the German printing industry. It has been seen as a straightforward and utilitarian typeface, with no unusual or distracting features. Like other typefaces from the 1920s, it reflects the philosophy of those times, "Form is Function." Today, however, because of its familiarity and practicality, Neuzeit™ Grotesk has acquired an almost cheerful and reassuring aura. Try it out for signage, magazine headlines, or flyers. See also Neuzeit S for text weights of Neuzeit Grotesk.

Tramuntana 1 Pro was inspired by the late Renaissance and Mannerist spirit and it was designed by Ricardo Santos during 2009 for his Master in Advanced Typography (Eina-Barcelona). This project was also inspired by Robert Granjon, Garamond and Sabon typefaces. The name tramuntana (Tramontane) is the Catalonian word for the cold wind that comes from the Pyrenees mountains and goes as far as the Balearic Islands. It was designed for editorial purposes (books and magazines). This typeface family contains different font versions for different optical sizes, caption, text, subhead and display, all of them with different x-height proportions and contrast. The serifs are asymmetrical and the letterforms have geometric modulated strokes which simulates the calligraphic variations. Its design approach gives a dynamic feeling, contributing to text flow and continuous reading. The kerning has been optimized for Baltic languages and Western, Southern, and Central European languages.

This late 19th century design conjures up early 20th century Dutch DeStijl lettering with a mostly strict adherence to right angles and minimal stroke modulation. Geometric began its life as a metal typeface from the Central Type Foundry, circa 1884. Soon after, this design was officially licensed to Morgans & Wilcox and was shown in their 1890 catalog in Regular, Light and Condensed Light variations. After acquiring Morgans & Wilcox, Hamilton Manufacturing offered Geometric Light Face Condensed as their own No 3020 and the Geometric Light Face as No 3021. HWT Geometric has been expanded digitally to include a Regular Condensed version. A heavier wood type specimen was found from an unknown manufacturer and digitized as it was found, resulting in the HWT Geometric Shopworn and Shopworn Inked variations. These digital versions all include a full Western and Central European character set of over 380 glyphs.