Introduced as the Chank Font of the Month for May 1998, Instructor was drawn Roger Lootine and fontified by Chank. Roger was an instructor at Art Instruction School. You know the "Draw Tippy the Turtle" ads? That's where Roger used to teach. He also draws a cool comic called Residue. "Roger's got the best handwriting I've ever seen, and you can download it today!" says Chank. "How lucky are you? Way lucky!" Now available in OpenType format for your Personal or Commercial Use.

Sunshine is the unlikely alphabet collision of Gobbler and Liquorstore. Chank's napkin scrawl smashed into the letters commonly found on signage at the neighborhood liquor store. Gobbler's blotchy textures fragmented Liquorstore's uniform stroke. It began as a hideous lumpy thing with random vector points everywhere. Chank came to the rescue with his Alphabetician's first aid kit. He smoothed the blunt corners with a few hammer blows. He wrapped the font in extra strokes, in a sans serif Roman style, to increase its contrast. His industrial influence helped stabilize Gobbler's gloppy qualities and his grunge aesthetic softened Liquor store's checkerboard rigidity. The end result is a font with a solid structure and a painterly wiggle that creates a dirty display or a slightly clumsy text face. Because of its many detailed strokes, it tends to look a little better in print than on the web. All organic. Earthy.

Skippy Sharp was drawn by Skippy McFadden in 1995 and faxed to Mister Chank Diesel. Chank completed the character set, added extensive kerning and created a very friendly, informal marker handwriting font. The font is also enhanced for OpenType use with Contextual Alternates for a more natural and organic handwriting style, and true Small Caps, too.

Gobble gobble gobble! The Gobbler font was drawn with a leaky pen on a napkin at the Modern Cafe in Northeast Minneapolis while the designer, Mister Chank Diesel, was waiting for some pot roast. “Apple cobbler drippings on the napkin add more character to the strokes of each letter,” says Chank. This font was originally named Modern Napkin, a free font released in 1997. Chank completed the character set, fixed some curves, and cleaned up some of the apple cobbler to make a more elegant font in 1999. Gobbler works great for either text or display purposes.

I read something interesting the other day: in 1910 a cat called Kiddo snuck on board an airship and was found by aeronaut Walter Wellman - after he had already taken off in an attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Wellman and Kiddo spent 71 hours aboard the airship, but never completed the journey, due to engine problems and foul weather. Luckily, they were both rescued. It was a funny story, so I decided to name a font after it. Reluctant Aviator is a handmade font (pen and paper). It has a rough edge, some shaky glyphs and a lot of bravado. Comes with diacritics and swashes.

Chank worked with Josh Eshbach, an intern from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, to create Cocaine as the Chank Font of the Month for November 2000. Inspired by Speedball type designs of the ’20s and ’30s, Cocaine has been redrawn and streamlined for use in the digital age. Curvy and round and relishing in its idiosyncrasies, Cocaine recalls vintage French wine posters and antique sheet music covers.

Here’s a workman-like collection of border elements gleaned from the specimen books of various American manufacturers of woodtype from around 1840 to 1885. Refer to the PDF guides for detailed, yet simple, instructions for constructing various border patterns, all with Victorian grace and charm.

The Madison Ave. family started from Madison Ave. at Fontstruct.com. As my most downloaded font, this was an easy, although not necessarily logical choice to make – regarding taking an existing free font and attempting to offer it for purchase. The font is very basic and simple in its layout, but has achieved popularity over at Dafont with almost 80,000 downloads with its cool, understated nature and inherent sophistication. The original Madison Ave. is now 95 Madison Ave. A couple of glyphs have changed from the original, but mostly the set is the same. The big news here is the availability of multiple variations on the original. Ninety-five refers to the filter settings used to achieve the faint cross lines in the font. The sequence 95-100 provides a gradual fade to solid effect when used together. The other versions use variations on the filter settings that allow each its own distinctive flavor, while at the same time maintaining inherent characteristics of the original. Ninety-five is now joined by 55, 75, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 155, 175, 201, 202, and 275. 100 is the solid version which doesn’t contain the trademark lines found in 95. In 95-99, the line width varies to achieve subtle effects. 50 and 85 are distorted by reducing the filter settings in a somewhat minimizing fashion. In 102-205, these are distorted by increasing the filter settings above the normal which is what 100 represents. While some of the effects are extreme and challenge the legibility of text, these can be fun or edgy. They offer a cohesion that can be used to advantage for different projects that require the use of a modern font family.

King George is a chaotic, bouncy, flyer display font that harkens back to Chank's roots as a grunge alphabetician. It also has a ransom note feel that reflects the stresses and randomness of this American life. Pure rebellion!

Chank created Zsazsa Galore as a fresh alternative to Mister Frisky, another jerky, hypercaffeinated interpretation of the traditional roman alphabet. The difference this time is that the new font has no descenders. Every letter comes to rest hard on the baseline. It sits there firmly rooted with branches wiggling around in the air. It was released as the Chank Font of the Month in October 1999 and it was named after Zsa Zsa Gabor because she is beautiful.

Show you school spirit with this sporty, collegiate font. These big chunky serifs let the world know you speak with authority, and they'll read your message clear as a bell. It's like a traditional college font, but it's got a chanky flair. Good for hockey jerseys and house parties.

Visine FF is a typeface that aims to question the geographical borders that in so many ways can define people's lives. It was developed with the experience of advertising and commercial use in mind. The name Visine can be translated most simply as HEIGHTS. Visine FF was developed out of the necessity to make the most of the space on the visual format. With the tall arches and narrow bodies with exceptional, easy-to-read features, Visine FF aims to complement visual languages in many linguistic regions. Visine FF was developed in the Balkans, where Cyrillic, Latin and Glagolitic were the three historical writing systems used in the former Yugoslavia to denote cultural, ethnic, religious and political identities. Today, the languages of the Western Balkans are so similar that they can easily be called dialects, although they are written in different scripts. This is the result of their coexistence and parallel evolutions, which gave a rise to the common traits. This font family celebrates all the languages and scripts of the Western Balkans and is a labour of love. Love of design, love of language and the human need to communicate across borders, cultures and identities.

In the spirit of the old days, before water sparkled and before typefaces were known as fonts, Chank is proud to introduce Chippewa Falls the font. This font comes with fancy swirly uppercase letters and stout small caps for lowercase, as well as a heart-warming story. Chank rescued this former custom font from an abandoned design proposal. He gave it some TLC and before long a retro typeface emerged, with lettering worthy of good old fashioned sleigh rides and candy canes. Enjoy this font as you would a cup of hot cocoa next to a potbelly stove on a snowy day.

Miss AmyLynn is the Southern scrawl of Former Miss Kentucky, Amy Lynn Brown. Like Chank's other popular handwriting fonts Wordy Diva and Skippy Sharp, Miss AmyLynn reflects a casual, intelligent, and creative personality. This font has a concise supply of alternate lowercase characters so you can create a more organic handwriting display in your designs. You can access these stylistic alternates when you use the OpenType version of the font in Adobe's Creative Suite programs. Amy is co-owner of Chowgirls, an up-and-coming catering company that she started with Chank's business manager. With the ambition to publish a cookbook, she created special characters that are essential for recipes, such as tsp, tbl and oz. Have a closer look and you'll find more exciting and humanifying OpenType features.

An unusual blend of block and script letterforms, based on poster lettering for an Italian fashion house of the same name, designed by Wilman Schiroli in 1935, and notable for its very jolly lowercase c. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

The cover of the sheet music for 1930's "Walkin' My Baby Back Home" features the title hand lettered in a bold sans serif with the slightest flair of Art Nouveau styling. This design is now available as Evening Walk JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Hello Sunflower! Enjoy this new vintage-style typewriter font, inspired by an old portable typewriter. Combining Chank's grunge and retro font styles, it has a classic rustic beauty, like sunflowers growing alongside an old farmhouse. Enjoy a new, multi-purpose display font for all your labeling and headline needs. Looks great on the web, too!

Kaytek™ Slab is a fresh take on the correspondence typefaces of the 90s - which were originally designed for the demands of office environments. Just like its predecessors, this text typeface is robust and hard-working - meaning it works well in challenging design or printing environments - but it’s not without personality. Look closer at the lowercase g and a, especially in the italic, and you can see some unexpected elements of subversiveness within the design. This blend of sturdiness and quirkiness means it’s just as relevant for information-heavy projects, such as annual reports, as it is in more expressive environments. Although first and foremost designed for text, Kaytek Slab’s details shine through in its heavier weights and larger sizes, meaning it also has display potential. Every style of the typeface takes up exactly the same amount of space, thanks to the way Radek Łukasiewicz created the design. He based the entire typeface on a single, master set of proportions. This means designers can switch between styles without the text being reflowed, making it particularly useful in magazines, where space might be limited, and also on the internet, where hover links appear in a different style. As well as its roots in the office, Kaytek Slab draws on a little bit more 90s nostalgia. It’s named for the first and only Polish walkman, and embodies the same solid, no-nonsense shapes that made the analogue technology of the era so charming. Kaytek Slab is robust and solid. Kaytek Slab comes in 12 weights, from Thin to Black Italic, and offers multi-language support. Kaytek Sans, Kaytek Headline and Kaytek Rounded, are also available.

Screeech! Ack! Ack! Mantisboy was created by Chank Diesel in 1995 as a custom font for the Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast web site. This font represents the printed voice of the talk show's bandleader, an evil alien mantis.

The Bitstream version of Caslon 3 of the American Type Founders, 1905.

THE DANISH RUNES Prior to 500 AD the 24-rune Elder Futhark was used in Denmark. From 500 AD to 800 AD there were many transitional futharks, reflecting a change from the 24-rune Futhark to the 16-rune Futharks. By the end of this period, the 24-rune Futhark went completely out of use and the 16-rune Futharks had prevailed. From 900 AD some of the runes changed, visually and phonetically. This occurred again about 950 AD and 1100 AD due to language changes. Runes dated to 1300 AD show evidence of being influenced by the Latin alphabet. Runes found in Skåne, Halland and Blekinge in Sweden, and runes found in Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, is counted among Danish runes, because in the Runic period, this was Danish land.

Lavaman was created by Chank Diesel in 1995 as a custom font for the Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast web site. This font represents the printed voice of the talk show's surly backstage engineer, who is a man made of molten lava.