A clean, well-lit design, Freight Sans proves that even a workhorse can be a breath of fresh air while remaining invitingly readable. Ideal for boundless headlines and text, the power and detail of this design also serves well in way-finding and display environs. From web to print to apps, it’s hard to imagine a project where Freight Sans wouldn’t do the job with aplomb. When you need a sans serif–you need Freight Sans.

Here is another design by jewelry designer Max Joseph Gradl. Zier is a verb, meaning to decorate, adorn or ornament; zierlich means decorative, elegant, fine, neat. Schrift means type. Zierschrift, therefore, means decorative type. Gradl Zierschriften is a decorative type in the Art Nouveau style, rather than the more ornate Victorian style. Very modern, very young, with an elegant simplicity of form. Maria Makela, in her book The Munich Secession (Princeton 1990) suggests that the frequent use of simple, flowing, organic forms that was so characteristic of Art Nouveau was a reaction against the growing complexity and rapid urbanization that resulted from 19th century industrialization. In keeping with that reaction is the hand-drawn quality that intentionally rejects a mechanistic mathematic precision of line rendering. Gradl Zierschriften preserves that hand-drawn quality. Designed with upper case only, this face was obviously intended for short headlines only and is best set at 18 points or larger. However, I don't think you really get to experience the grace of this design until you get to 36 points or more. In the larger sizes, it is simply stunning. Please note that while most of the uppercase letterforms are repeated in the lower case for convenience, the ‘F’,‘L’ and ‘T’ are rendered a little narrower than in the uppercase to provide for visual variety. The font also includes a generous supply of ligatures for just the right fit ... and just for the fun of using them. Three common ways of inserting a ligature, accented letter or other special character are: 1) Key in “ALT”+“0”+[ascii #]; for example ALT+0233 for the e-acute, 2) From within your application program, go to the INSERT menu and look for something like “Insert Symbol,” (this function is NOT available in all application programs) & 3) Cut & Paste from the CHARACTER MAP display that has been supplied by every generation of Windows Operating System that I can recall (All Programs>Accessories>System Tools). Isn't it amazing what you can do? Don't be afraid to experiment. If you back up your work, you have very little to lose and a lot to gain. Not only do you acquire a new tool, but by the very process you have learned how to continually expand your knowledge and skill base.

Savigny began as an offshoot of Le Havre. Le Havre met my design objective of a geometric sans serif with a strong art deco touch. Le Havre’s primary inspiration came from the art deco titling of the 1930’s, and the lower case was just icing. The art of the 1930’s is of particular interest to me, and I love the art deco era and its art, and the simplicity of geometric shapes. I am mostly interested in designing display typefaces. In many ways Le Havre was the exact opposite of another popular insigne offering, Aviano Sans. Le Havre has very high ascenders, a lower case and is very condensed. Aviano Sans has no lowercase and extremely extended capitals. With the rise of webfonts I began to see Le Havre being used frequently online. It’s short x-height and very tall ascenders made it difficult to read in on screen text settings as it was intended as display type. With this observation, I felt that there is more room for a geometric sans in the insigne catalog. So I set about to design a new geometric sans using the successful skeleton of the Le Havre family. Although I planned to extend the Le Havre line, the new family is so drastically different I decided on a new name: Savigny. The face evolved and began to take on a few humanist touches. Designed from the very beginning as a webfont, the design is open and pleasing to the eye, with a tall x-height. To optimize it for onscreen settings, the spacing is generous. In addition, it includes extended and condensed members, making it insigne’s first superfamily. The family includes over 100 OpenType alternate characters. These include several style sets. Some are stemless, others are purely geometric, and in a nod to Savigny’s origins, Art Deco titling alternates. Please see the informative .pdf brochure to see these features in action. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Savigny is a great choice for a professional designer who wants a well rounded typeface family that is ready for the web.

Babylon was a civilisation that stretched from Bagdad to the Persian Gulf. There is an Old and new Babylonia, the era of Babylon civilization and the biblical Babylon. The oldest scriptures to be found since the rise of civilisation are Babylonic. The Christian, the Jewish and the Arabic culture find its origin in the Middle East. And share more or less the same history, the same roots and DNA. One people, but in reality a melting pot of close related cultures whom could not be more far apart, hostile and suspicious towards each other. An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. One could say this disagreement is still alive today and has deeply infected all of our systems. Beyond Babylon is sculpted after Hebrew, Arabic character style elements in a European writing. It questions what happened after the great Babylonic confusion. Did the words finally come across? Did they realize the distant and gap was maybe smaller than expected. This typeface is related to my former character Eurabia. As an artist I like to play with contradictions. Use opposite elements and mould them in to one understandable piece and in addition a thought to chew on. Otherwise the experimental ore shape lovin' typeface user could be very happy with an addition feature to the existing characters. One option more to express your selves in writing. Also this typeface is really suitable for theme writing or advertising. ----------- Babylon war eine Zivilisation die sich von Bagdad bis zum Persischen Golf erstreckte. Es gibt das alte und das neue Babylon, die Ära der Babylon Zivilisation und das biblische Babylon. Die ältesten Schriften, welche seit dem Aufstieg der Zivilisation gefunden wurden, sind babylonisch. Die Christen, die Juden und die arabische Kultur finden ihren Ursprung im Mittleren Osten. Sie teilen mehr oder weniger die gleiche Geschichte, die gleichen Wurzeln und DNA: Ein Volk. Aber in Wirklichkeit waren sie ein Schmelztiegel aus eng verwandten Kulturen, welche sich nicht ferner sein könnten: feindselig und misstrauisch zueinander. Auge um Auge, Zahn um Zahn. Man könnte behaupten, diese Unstimmigkeit bestehe noch heute und hätte all unsere Systeme stark infiziert. Beyond Babylon ist eine europäische Schrift, geformt nach hebräischen und arabischen Stilelementen der Zeichen. Sie hinterfragt die Geschehnisse nach der der Babylonischen Sprachverwirrung. Kamen die Worte endlich an? Haben sie realisiert, dass die Weite des Spalts zwischen ihnen vielleicht geringer war als erwartet. Diese Schrift ist verwandt mit meinen vorigen Zeichen der Eurabia. Als Künstlerin mag ich es mit Widersprüchen zu spielen, gegensätzliche Elemente zu einem vernehmbaren Ganzen zu verschmelzen und einen kniffligen Gedanken zu erzeugen. Andererseits könnte der experimentelle oder formenverliebte Nutzer sehr glücklich über eine zusätzliche Funktion der bestehenden Zeichen sein. Eine weite Möglichkeit sich im Schreiben auszudrücken. Diese Schrift ist auch für Werbung sehr geeignet.

Gothic Tuscan One is a all-cap condensed gothic with round terminals and decorative “tuscan” center spurs. It was first shown by William H. Page of Norwich, Connecticut among his wood type specimen pages of 1859. Gothic Tuscan One exemplifies the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for simple, visually strong typeface. Although about 14 miles inland, Norwich lies at the head of the Thames River. The river is both wide and deep, and therefore was not bridged in the early 20th century. From the 17th century until then, if you wanted to get from Groton on the west bank to the whaling port of New London on the east bank by land, you had to had to go by way of Norwich. Because of its size, the Thames is navigable all the way from Norwich to New London. Docks were built in Norwich around 1685 and the city became Connecticut’s 2nd largest port by 1800. With the construction of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad in 1835, Page could easily ship his wood type north by rail or south by coastal schooner. Included with our font, Gothic Tuscan One, are two 19th century printer’s ornaments of sailing ships similar to those that sailed up the Thames to Norwich. There is also a more contemporary glyph of a whale, looking quite pleased that the only whaling ship left in Connecticut is the Charles W. Morgan, permanently moored at Mystic Seaport. Reference: Moon’s Handbooks, Connecticut 2nd Edition (Emeryville CA 2004). Gothic Tuscan One ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 332 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, ornm and dlig. 3. Added 330 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Redesigned mathamatical operators 6. Included of both tabular (std) & proportional numbers (optional). 7. Refined various glyph outlines. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

When I first saw the scrapbook pages of Danielle Paradis, I was immediately struck by the funky-cool distinction of her handwriting style. I was inspired and felt moved to ask her for samples, from which to build a complete font. This warm and friendly font is applicable to a wide variety of uses. Use it wherever a casual cool look is desired. It's right at home on trendy restaurant menus, children's publications, organic food labels, correspondence and of course, scrapbooks, to suggest a few. A number of stylistic alternates are included.

Barkanon is not your ordinary humanist sans serif typeface. Blending modern styling with classic humanist flow creates a bold and captivating look. Designed to be expressive in the right places and legible where needed. Barkanon is great for headings, body copy, logos, etc. Barkanon was picked to be a part of the 2024 Typodarium and an early version of the font was featured on James Edmonson's (Oh No Type Co) YouTube channel Barkanon covers 96 languages, 9 styles plus italics, with stylistic alternates, ligatures, and other opentype features.

Guenter type got its name after Guenter Gnauck — the calligrapher from Eastern Germany whose works brought an inspiration and initial incitement for the design. But in contradiction to the calligraphic nature of the inspiration source Guenter has a specific construction that is built solely with straight stems. Like KvadratZ family Guenter belongs to so called 'in-one-touch' series. The first version in one basic style was developed by Zakhar Yaschin in 2001. In 2009 the font was redesigned with addition of 3 new styles and released by ParaType as a family.

Font breeding is much like animal breeding, where stallion and mare, or bull and cow, or boar and sow are carefully matched in hopes of yielding a robust and useful offspring. When typefaces RoundUp with fat, rounded serifs and WyomingSpaghetti with fat, squarish serifs were chosen to be parents, it was clear that their offspring would inherit large serifs. But to discover exactly what the offspring would look like, the pairing needed to be consummated, which was done with the “Blend Fonts” commend in Fontographer. The two styles of RoundWhy are the result.

PT Octava™ was designed at ParaType in 2001 by Vladimir Yefimov. The first (Cyrillic only) version named Scriptura Russica (1996) consisting of three styles (book, italic, bold) was commissioned by the Russian Bible Society. Lately the Latin letters and bold italic were added. Inspired by Lectura, 1969, by Dick Dooijes and Stone Print, 1991, by Sumner Stone. In spite of large x-height the typeface is both space saving and quite legible at small sizes. Expert fonts including small caps (book) and old style figures are available.

Architype Crouwel is a collection of typefaces created in collaboration with Wim Crouwel, following his agreement with The Foundry, to recreate his experimental alphabets as digital fonts. Crouwel's most recognized work was for the Van Abbe and Stedelijk museums (1954 –72) where he established his reputation for radical, grid-based design. Architype Catalogue originates from Wim Crouwel’s Stedelijk Museum exhibition catalogue for sculptor Claes Oldenburg, 1970. The cover’s soft ‘padded’ letterforms evoke the artist’s work. Oldenburg was so taken with the design, that he asked Crouwel to complete the alphabet.

The Bitstream version of Melior, a twentieth century modern face commissioned by Stempel and designed by Hermann Zapf in 1952. It is based on Zapf’s thoughts about the squared-off circle known as a super-ellipse. The type was originally intended as a newspaper text face by Linotype. Hermann Zapf’s Melior exhibits a robust character through classic and objective forms. Versatile and extremely legible, it can be used for a variety of texts and point sizes. Cyrillic version was developed by Natalya Vasilyeva and licensed by ParaType in 2002.

Say hello to State, this family is inspired by sport and a further development on Comply Slab. This family of fonts has some bold letters as well as stylistic alternates to give your layouts some interesting variation. State comes in 3 styles, Regular, Soft and Rough each with 7 weights and italics. It was specifically designed with a wider structure for better appearance in small sizes and the extra attention to the detail was needed for the big sizes. Use State to get the delivery you need, whether its for print, online or Television.

Maison Neue is the completely reworked version of our original Maison typeface family. While the earlier version was constructed using rigid elements, Maison Neue has been meticulously redrawn to be less formulaic and have a stronger focus on optical criteria to create a distinct grotesque paying greater attention to harmony, rhythm and flow. In 2017, Maison Neue was further developed and expanded into a super family of 40 styles. This includes the subtly condensed original version, an extended counterpart, a mono-spaced alignment—all featuring additional weights within each family.

Another jewel of the vast treasure of historical font designs was digged out and brought to life again. Due to the courtesy of the Quay Brothers, London, who yielded to me an age-old brochure of Albert Auspurg’s ‚Miami‘, released by Schriftguss in 1934, I was able to redesign this elegant font. This font which I called ‚Elbflorenz‘, a cognomen for Dresden, contains West and Central European type faces as well as those for Romanian and Turkish. To get access to the historical number sign please use either the OT feature additional ligatures or ordinals.

Maharlotte Calligraphy is an elegant font with heart touch and warm desire. For those of you who are need a touch of elegance and modernity for your designs or branding, this font was created for you! Maharlotte was built with OpenType features and includes stylistic set alternate and some quirky ligatures. And there is ending swashes, numbers, punctuation, and it also supports other languages. This font is PUA encoded = Accessible in the Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, even work on Microsoft Word. PUA Encoded Characters - Fully accessible without additional design software.

Hasan Ghada is an Arabic display typeface. It is useful for titles and graphic projects. The font is based on the simple lines of Modern Kufi calligraphy with new ideas for square shapes and geometric feel. It supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu. This font was designed in 2002 and the first version was released under name KactTitle in the typefaces group of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), which supported the Linux operation system. In 2007, I developed this font and created five weights of it.

ITC Musclehead is the work of type designer Timothy Donaldson, a robust, densely packed handwriting typeface. It almost looks like brushwork but was in fact made with a ruling pen which Donaldson had bought from a company in Salem, Massachusetts. He says, The world's gone ruling-pen mad at the moment [late 1990s] and I was beginning to tire of all the skinny splashiness of the letters that most people were making with them. I wanted to do something heavy and robust with the tool, so that's what I did.""

This font was inspired by the title logo of the TV show The Wild Wild West (season two). The font was named after the train in the TV show. Wanderer is a combination of my Classic Tuscan Rodeo Clown font and a Robust Slab Serif font. Wanderer is available as a stand alone font or with the optional fill fonts. Caution: Use of this font may cause the Wild Wild West theme song to play over and over in your head. Solution: Try temporarily using another FontMesa font such as Rough Riders.

Berliana Monoline is typeface was inspired by handwriting using markers. While the name is a word other than Diamonds, namely jewelry worn by many women in the world. Diamond jewelry is so expensive and full of luxury. As regards with diamonds, this font was created to present the luxury of very beautiful diamonds. This font is suitable for wedding invitations, design, logo or branding, or as the font for the typography. Many features in this font such as ligatures, stylistic alternate, fina, swashes, etc with a total more than 370++ Glyphs.

Nat Grotesk family consists of 14 styles including 6 narrow ones. It has a half-closed sans serif design with simple and clear lettershapes. Due to compact proportions the face is very space saving, but nevertheless it is rather legible even in small sizes. The bold weights demonstrate increased contrast. The font is recommended for text and display typography as well as for headlines and advertising. It was designed by Natalia Vasilyeva and released by ParaType in 2007. The upgraded version with extended character set was released in 2009.

No Dr. was inspired by an old movieposter lettering for the 1962 movie "James Bond: Dr. No". Just like the original Dr. No, No Dr. has a diabolical charm. It was developed into a font family that combines distinctiveness with versatility. It has a good readibility as a textfont but also looks great as a Headline. The two widths and the two weights give you a big choice. Intended to become an interesting alternative to the much used DIN Schrift, it has now developed into a highly functional family of it's own.

During the heydey of automobile travel hundreds of motels, motor courts and tourist cabins sprung up along the roadways in order to offer weary drivers (and most often their families) rest with a night's lodging. Tourist Cabin JNL takes the inline portion from the inline font Asbury Park JNL and creates this pleasant monoline design. The original design inspiration (from which the inline portion of the letters was taken) was a 1930s WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal art project poster with the hand-lettered words “Work with Care”

Swissra is an Arabic typeface that was inspired from Swiss graphic design. The motivation behind the typeface was to create a neutral and carefully crafted Arabic font family that can be used on many different applications. Swissra also aspires to tribute the experience of Swiss graphic design and pass it on to the Arabic graphic design scene. Swissra features sharply cut terminals, which are either horizontal or vertical. It also features closed apretures and a high x-height. It comes with eight weights, that range from thin to black.

Linotext was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1901 and first appeared with the name Wedding Text with American Type Founders in Jersey City, where its metal forms were cut by hand. The font was so popular that its forms soon began appearing with other font foundries under different names, Elite Kanzlei with D. Stempel AG, Comtesse with C.F. Rühl, etc. Its ornamental forms are not considered very legible by today’s standards and Linotext should therefore be used for headlines and short texts in point sizes 12 or larger.

Lindsey Pro is a new handwriting style font with advanced OpenType features including alternative characters and ligatures. Lindsey Pro was created by Steve Matteson based on a teenager’s handwriting. It is a casual typeface design with irregular alignments and occasional connections. Lindsey is a fun font to use in a wide range of documents, from Valentine’s Day cards to invitations, memos, greeting cards, signs and correspondence. Lindsey Pro was developed to take advantage of the rich typographic OpenType features of applications Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXPress 7, and Microsoft Expression.

What has become a rite of passage at baseball games got its start in 1908 when lyricist Jack Norworth and music composer Albert Von Tilzer wrote "Take Me Out to the Ball-Game" (which was published by Von Tilzer's York Music Company). The Art Nouveau hand lettered title on the cover of the sheet music was eccentric and attractive enough to warrant being turned into a digital type face, and in honor of its namesake song is called Ball Game JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

A decorative capitalis font inspired by the renaissance font Rotunda and old calligraphic foundings. From the beginning my aim was to design a font which focusses on simplyfing historical typography. I wanted to give people the possiblity to write with letters which refer to history but still are readable and modern. It is perfect for headlines and logos that need a historical touch. The font Lucrezia and its dangerous forms (the stitchy endings) are also inspired by the history of Lucrezia Borgia, who as we know, was a very mysterious person.

An ad in the Oct. 27, 1919 issue of the trade magazine “The Moving Picture World” promoted “Princess Virtue” from Bluebird Pictures starring Mae Murray – The Adorable [as noted by the movie studio in the ad]. The Art Nouveau hand lettering emulated the style usually drawn with a round nib pen, but was given a specialized treatment for the ad. It was re-drawn in a more traditional ‘pen nib’ look for digital revival. The end result is Silent Movies JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Do you need a hand-drawn, heavy, creative typeface? If so, WILK is perfect for you! This font was created specially for fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" and it was inspired by the fairy-tale's character of wolf . The typography is tight- knit and fat but also free and funny. It consists only of uppercases, but it has two up to five alternative gifs for each letter. This great choice of gifs makes WILK perfect for long texts but not only! It's also great in a large magnification.

String Theory has been a 10+ year project in the making which originated from a type workshop in Graduate School at Otis College of Art & Design. The workshop was hosted by Dutch designer Hansje Van Halem, and we were tasked to play with string to create letterforms. Thus String Theory was born, and slowly migrated from yarn, to an illustrator file, to what it is today as a type family. Each glyph has it’s own custom string set up, along with each weight. Experimental in nature, edgy, with subliminal angst and grittiness.

This typeface was inspired by a font used by Henrie Ballard. Ballard operated on Fleet Street at the Signe of the Bear in London, England. He was active in the industry from 1597-1608. The font is meant to capture the feel of the original typeface with the capability of reproducing the many ligatures that are part of what make that era's printing interesting. The Italic version has a dramatic feel that is almost handwritten in appearance. Every Proportional Lime font comes with a complete guide to its Unicode extended character set.

Phoenica Std Mono expands the already large family of my very successful Phoenica. The motivation to develop a new mono-Phoenica family was that I was not satisfied with monospaced fonts in programming code, or simply in e-mail correspondence. The Mono Phoenica solves the problem of a typical monospaced font, a rigid, fixed width. The design gradations from Condensed monospaced to monospaced from 390em to 600em-square incurred a total of 21 fonts. Packages contain the fonts in CFF-OpenType and TrueType format, so you can use these beautiful fonts on all operating systems.

The title on the cover of Street & Smith’s “Wild West Weekly” for Jan. 27, 1934 made for an interesting contrast in terms. Here was a pulp magazine dedicated to stories of the Old West, but its title was hand lettered in an extra bold, squared shape style using a round pen nib – not exactly an alphabet that represented cowboys and desperados… This aside, this type style made for a good digital font revival, and it is now available as Bold Pen Lettering JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Twirrewyn is Frisian for ‘Whirlwind’. I have always liked the Frisian language; it’s like a crossover between English and Dutch. When I studied journalism in Zwolle (a city close to Fryslân) there were a lot of Frisian students and I did pick up a few words! Twirrewyn is a handmade font family: the fat version was made using a brush and ink; the light version was made using that same ink, but with a broken satay skewer instead of a brush. And yes, you have guessed right, we eat a lot of Satay! ;-)

This script font was inspired by the “Ronde” French script. It was in use from 1700s to 1900s (until 1960s in special circumstances) for registers, legal documents and texts, certificates, labels and other documents that must be particularly legible. Today in France, it is still being used for menus, advertising, and labels. The present version is a late 19th Century pattern. This font supports very strong enlargements as well as small sizes. When printed, it remains perfectly legible and elegant from 9/11 pts even if using an ordinary inkjet printer.

This family was inspired by the set of fonts used in Paris by Ponce Rosset, aka “Faucheur” to print the account of the second voyage to Canada by Jacques Cartier, first edition, in 1545. It is a Garalde set, the punchcutter is unknown, certainly it was not Garamond himself. In our two styles (normal and italic), fontfaces, kernings and spaces are scrupulously the same as in the original. This Pro font covers Western, Eastern and Central European languages (including Celtic) Baltic and Turkish, with standard and long-s ligatures in each of the two styles.

Deep in the bowels of the earth a tortured creature tries to mimic the writings of mankind. It labors long and hard carving the letter forms on the walls of its cave. Many years later, rubbings where taken of these impressions and fashioned to create this hideous font. All kidding aside, with such a formal training in type design, it was not easy for me to create these ill-shaped letters. I kept wanting to smooth out the outlines. Anyway, it was a good exercise and we now have this antique heavy-weight.

There was a big climate protest in Amsterdam a couple of days ago. During Greta’s speech, a man jumped onto the stage and grabbed her microphone, because he didn’t approve of what she was saying. Some English media referred to him as ‘the stage invader’, which I really liked. Long story short: I made a ‘protest-ish’ font, using cheap black finger paint from the local store and a brush from my kids. The result is a rather unique font called Stage Invader. And yes, you can use it for your protest signs too!