African Shield is named for the cow-hide shields used by Zulu warriors. The shield was an essential part of the weaponry of the Zulu Nation. In the days of the great King Shaka, every Zulu warrior was armed with a shield, one or more throwing assegais (type of spear) and a stabbing spear. The high-contrast design of the shield has inspired a font that translates into exciting graphic designs.

Benton Modern was first prepared as a text face by Font Bureau for the Boston Globe and the Detroit Free Press. Design and proportions were taken from Morris Fuller Benton’s turn-of-the-century Century Expanded, drawn for ATF, faithfully reviving this epoch-making magazine and news text roman. The italic was based on Century Schoolbook. These display cuttings were prepared by Dyana Weissman and Richard Lipton; FB 2008

Back in the 20th Century B.C. (Before Computers) there was what was known as a "paper" office. Workers used typewriters, correction fluid and a drawer full of rubber stamps. Jeff Levine has taken twenty-six of the common phrases found on those old office stamps and created Stamp of Approval JNL. Use these images as they are, or run them through a filter for a worn or inked-up effect.

Canadian Serge Pichii was inspired by decorative lettering produced during the early 1920s by Jan Tschichold to create Ironwork. Similarly, his ITC Ancestor family was influenced by early work, but in this case, much earlier work: the characters carved by native British Columbian people on solid rock. He worked with anthropologists and linguists to produce a series of books dedicated to the history and culture of the people.

The inspiration for Home Room JNL was a 1950s-era package of die cut cardboard letters and numbers manufactured for educators by the Mutual Aids Company of Los Angeles, California. Pre-cut lettering was popular with teachers who used them in their classrooms for posters, bulletin boards, displays and flash cards. These bold, blocky letters are great for headlines or for recreating the look of school days past.

Rosengarten is a condensed, bold typeface inspired by the work of Lucien Bernhard and the Plakatstil mouvement. With bold, rounded serifs, this typeface was created for use in headlines and larger point sizes. A complimentary sans serif style was integrated as a secondary weight with accompanying italics to allow a combination of styles to be set in layouts. This typeface includes an extended Latin and Cyrillic language support.

Teamhair Tower is a “rough” monowidth font based on the face used on the old Sears Tower Gaelic manual typewriter. Teamhair was first digitized in 2002 by Michael Everson and originally used the MacGaelic character set on the Macintosh platform, and ISO/IEC 8859-14 on the PC. In 2008 Doire version 3 was released in OpenType format, completely compliant with Unicode encoding and with an extended character set.

BRIGNELL SLAB is an eight font family designed by Ian Brignell. Curvaceous and dynamic, this unique slab exudes honesty and personality. A slab serif characterized by a soft treatment where normally you would see vertical serifs. This feature allows for a smoother, less toothy, reading effect. Brignell Slab was born in 2008 and was inspired by the logo and custom font Ian designed for Naturalizer. Extended Latin set.

Hiya, kids! Hiya, hiya, hiya! was the customary greeting of Froggy (a rather cheap rubber toy), who played second banana to otherwise-perennial sidekick Andy Devine on the 1950s TV show, Andy's Gang. The Magic Twanger was the thing which, when plunked, brought on the cartoons and other kid-friendly fare. The Opentype version of this font supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages, as well as Unicode 1252 (Latin) languages.

An ad spotted in a 1964 issue of Billboard magazine with the words “STAND BACK…” introduced the first record album from then-new stand-up comedian Bill Cosby. The lettering of those two words was in a stencil sans serif design that was a perfect candidate for developing into a digital font. The end result is Advertising Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.

Rendering JNL was inspired by European-style plastic stencils which emulate the block lettering with rounded ends used for years by architectural draftspersons.

Based on an engravers’ pattern plate, this outline form deriving from an English roundhand was fitted to linecasting matrices by Intertype about 1940.

This is a great poster font. It was created by hand, scanned and digitalized for quality. Font includes over 200 characters and glyphs.

Blooming Ornaments was inspired by patterns of the Middle Ages. There is an assortment of 47 ornaments located under the character set keys.

KnewFontWaisted is a informal font that was produced by distorting the handwritten font KnewFont. It is more concave and compacted than the original.

JoeHand was one of the first scripts by JOEBOB graphics. A complete character set with numbers and most (but not all) special signs.

Paramilitary JNL from Jeff Levine was modeled after a set of brass interlocking stencils and offers another choice in digital stencil typeface design.

A vintage metal sign saying "No Dogs Allowed" was the model for the ultra-bold Art Deco-influenced lettering comprising Informational Sign JNL.

Bitstream’s Oranda was designed by the noted Dutch designer Gerard Unger as a custom project for the European printer manufacturer, Océ, in 1986.

No Parking JNL was inspired by a hand-cut stencil of those words painted in an area of a department store's parking lot.

Lonestar is a revival of the old classic slab serif font named Hellenic which was very popular in the middle to late 1800s.

The block style lettering with rounded corners found on a package for model railroad kit parts was the inspiration for Model Railroad JNL.

Type DR Galushki was awarded a Honor Diploma for Excellence in Type Design at the International Type Design Competition TypeArt 05 (Moscow, 2005).

Resiliency3 font family was designed for use in sports and fitness themes. Gaming is another genres that the font family pairs well with.

Arte Critique JNL was modeled after an alphabet in an early 20th Century French lettering book spotted online at an image sharing site.

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul

Bango Pro is a lively, heavyweight font with a strong cartoon feel, perfect for poster design, packaging, and anything that needs to draw attention - in an informal way. Originally released with uppercase and unicase characters only, this new version (commissioned in 2013 by a London-based design agency) includes lowercase characters and some additional OpenType features, like stylistic alternates, fractions, localized forms, among others.

We are calling for a boycott against petty power struggles. Uppercase and Lowercase are slightly different from each other. This grungy font won prize at the best font 2006 and new Rising Star at MyFonts. “Boycott’s a noisy design -a little rough around the edges, but just the way we like our big grunge fonts. boycott is a perfect design for posters and large headlines.”