The designers of wood type in the 1880s did not lack for inspiration or imagination. From extremely ornate designs to ultra compressed or condensed alphabets, there was no shortage of variety.
Saddle Tramp JNL is one such compressed font.
Its wide, bold design coupled with its squat appearance allows for multiple words in a headline without overuse of page space.
Stencil Project JNL combines a number of themes within the many decorative stencil designs re-drawn from vintage sources.
Wood Type Bodoni JNL is a variant of the popular ultra bold version of the classic Bodoni design, with variants in character widths and shapes.
Based on a vintage set of wood type, the “hairline” strokes of the 4 and 8 have been made ever-so-slightly thicker in spots to add a modest amount of additional contrast.
Printing Press Designs JNL accumulates various vintage embellishments, ornaments, border elements and miscellaneous designs into one handy collection.
Before 1959, in pre-Castro Havana, Cuba, the preeminent nightclub was the Tropicana.
During the regime of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba was resplendent with nightclubs and gambling casinos catering to [mostly] the North American tourists; which brought it the title of the Monte Carlo of the Americas.
Although Cuba (and the world as a whole) has changed vastly over the decades, the hand-lettered logo of the Tropicana Night Club has survived, and has been reproduced as a complete digital font called Tropicano JNL (a slight twist to the club’s name).
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Back to 1880-1900 when a number of events were coming together, the country was evolving from a local market economy to mass merchandising, rail systems were being built and color lithography was becoming more affordable.
The first rail cars full of oranges were being shipped from Southern California to the East - what a treat during a cold winter’s day.
Labels were pasted on every fruit crate and these labels had large images of oranges and orange groves. More…
In order to market their products many California Canneries pooled their resources to form the California Fruit Canners Assn. in 1899.
Loaded with alternates, swashes, stylistic and multilingual support.
Story Brush is the high detailed brush font that has over 240 glyphs. This font is equipped with OpenType feature to make custom feel for your design. The story brush typeface is designed for t-shirts design, logos, horror design, grunge & etc.
Use discretionary ligatures to make your design really nice!
See all picture for detail.
This font is a collection of ornaments related to Halloween, There are a variety of cobwebs, dead trees, witche’s brooms and skulls.
It would combine very well with Bramble Wood 2.
Linotype Freytag is a condensed display face with simple, geometric shapes. With its highly readable and trendy letterforms, it is perfect for flyers, advertising, packaging, posters and magazine headlines.
The inspiration source for Baelon Monogram is an alphabet set from the book, Monograms and Alphabets for Combination by Dollfus Mieg & Cie, first published in the 1890s. What began as 26 referenced outline/shadowed letters became an over 800 character font in order to create its unique interwoven monogram effect! More…
Classic roman forms combine to make elegant monograms like designer branding, and you can also choose to type in all capitals or all lowercase for simple title and headlines as well. (Note that due to the manner in which combination monograms are formed, some letters like the I will change to script-like forms to avoid being hidden in overlaps).
An uppercase font, perfect for titles and headlines, in both a sketchy and a solid version.
This font was made in collaboration with Nikki at Melonheadz Illustrating. The quirky look and feel of the lettering is perfect for illustrations for children.
This cute bunting style font includes extras like a cupcake, anchor, and a fleur de lis. Use the ( ) { } [ ] to make end pieces and join them with the underscore __.
Tall, chunky title-friendly sans serif capitals in 3 styles. Use all caps for even lettering or alternate caps and lowercase for bouncy lettering.
This Ladie’s Hand Style font is somewhat very similar to ornamental penmanship, but uses a slightly longer ascenders and descenders and a modest shading. Originally the Ladies Hand had less flourishings, which was ideal for writing long letters.
Even though its name suggests it was a feminine writing style, it was widely used by most male penman and even Spencer reserved the use of the Ladie’s style to write to his close friends and relatives, as he considered it a more sincere and heartfelt style.
This present typeface does not restrict to the simplicity of the original Ladies Hand Capitals, and has several OpenType features and flourished capitals which creates a very versatile typeface, while maintaning the elegance of its style.
One of the original Clarendon types, an English design, here derived from a specimen taken from an American foundry, no identifying marks. With a tall x-height, wide version, unlike more traditional Clarendons, not a square serif but bracketed.
Unique to this Clarendon are the rounded openings at the points where the horizontal and vertical stems meet in the capital B, D, P and R, not common in other Clarendons.
Radikal is a geometric font dedicated to the research of purity. The Radikal family includes 7 weights, from UltraThin to Black, with their corresponding italics. Each font includes OpenType Features such as Proportional Figure, Tabular Figures, Numerator, Superscript, Denominators, Scientific Inferiors, Subscript, Ordinals, Fractions and ligatures.
The fonts have an extended characters set to support Central, Eastern and Western European languages.
Radikal is perfectly suitable for headlines, the range of styles provides flexibility for text and title.
Ganton is a heavy, yet elegant bodonian style serif typeface which is mainly made for higher resolution lettering such as headlines, titling, etc. The high contrast with the custom tails and terminals grant a unique and decorative look for your design.
Rabid is an inky, messy, super distressed display font. It’s part charcoal, part chalk strokes, add a splash a of red and it starts to look like blood. Why SO Serious? It has about 200 glyphs including all those extra pesky foreign features.
O Hope you like it.
We've all been here before...
It’s 3 A.M. and the deadline is in five hours. The coffee, tea or what-have-you has run low. The once sharp pencils have been decimated to dull non-existent nubs which is sort of an analogy for how you're feeling right now.
You're drawing a massive blank and the absolute last thing that had to be done on the long list of requests is a simple badge logo with a bit of a "mid-century-modernish-sort-of-feel-to-it?" More…
We also know that researching, scanning and vectorizing such a “simple” shape could take away from the more important matter of meeting your deadline on time. As we have said before, we have been where you are and with that knowledge we the friendly folks at AKOFAType thought we would offer a little something to ease the stress a bit.
Sure on the front end the name is a bit funny but this OpenType workhorse is packed with up to 88 emblems, badges and crests that range from straightforwardly straight-laced to outlandish vintage gaudiness and back again all in a matter of keystrokes.
BULKY is the 19th Font of André Toet. It’s unusual, it’s heavy, it’s irregular, it’s rough, it’s stripy, it’s angular. But it has character and extremely useful for headings, posters and even logotypes.
Just-Use-It! Art Direction: André Toet - Design: Jasper Nijssen.
Paper Cube font family is the first font I've created. I unconciously started to draw letterforms with straight horizontal and vertical lines contained in a square. Soon this experiment became a 3d outlined display family of 3 weights, each one of them gaining depth and articulating into planes.
Designed in Cuenca (Spain) in 2011.
Chip Tunes font family is a geometric 3d pixel display typeface. It was inspired by–and designed while–listening to the chip tunes and 8bit styles of music.
Designed in the UCLM, Cuenca in 2011.
Although originally conceived as a magazine face – with strong serifs and open character shapes for good legibility in small sizes, and compact letter forms optimized for narrow columns and tight headlines – Marat evolved into a comprehensive family for general use.
This specific construction and the round forms of the letters create a elegant, soft and friendly appearance.
The typeface suits for a wide range of typography, e.g. editorial, brochures, packaging and corporate design. In particular in bold weights it works surprisingly well, which is not always the case with serif faces.
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ligatures, case sensitive forms, fractions, superiors and inferiors). It is the perfect companion for Marat Sans, clean and lively sans serif typeface.
Arya is a display typeface, based on Roman proportions. It has three versions, differentiated by the amount of the drawn lines. Single is solid. Double is sturdy but light. Triple is versatile and includes alternatives.
They can be combined in layers. Capsule versions (White and Black) are designed to do quick, simple and elegant labels.
Cuivrerie is a free interpretation of relatively common lapidary inscriptions in Burgundy.
Letters fit together. Thus the engraver gains room and we lose legibility. No matter, we have forever to read !
Some time ago, I found myself in a clinic with my wife: at the time she was 20 weeks pregnant and had to do an ultrasound. To pass the time, I leafed through some (ladies') magazines which were lying around.
Most of them tackled big issues like which shoes to wear and what type of foundation to plaster on, but one glossy featured a photo shoot. The photographer had found an old building with a beautiful art deco tile mural and had placed his skinny model in front of it.
Fortunately for me, the mural featured a lot of text in a beautiful frilly style. I re-created the font I saw and it became “Jubileum” - which just means Jubilee in Dutch.
Mr Dodo is a hand drawn typeface family with eight styles. Four weights with a rounded version for each one. It has uppercase and lowercase characters with up to three alternate glyphs. Each style was drawn separately.
We did not interpolate any glyphs to keep an irregular, organic feeling. This way you can combine different styles without worrying that same characters will look like a awkward copy when standing close to each other.
It has build in OpenType Contextual Alternates feature that will automatically set alternate glyphs depending on frequency of appearance of the same character (even in web font but only in HTML5 browsers).
The script doesn’t just throw random glyphs.
This hand drawn serif font is perfect for giving a fun touch to your projects. It combines a handmade look and rough texture with classic serif forms. It has support for most western and central European languages, and has alternates for most letterforms accessible through Opentype features, allowing for variations that make it look authentically hand-drawn.
A slightly offbeat latin typestyle, Screwby started as a digitization of a film typeface called Surf by Lettergraphics. From there, this wonderful typeface was expanded into a giant family of fun widths and weights to play with: from spindly thin and light weights, to chunky bold and blacks.
An all-around fantastic treat!
Domani from CounterPoint is a faithful digital revival of an old photo-typositing face called ITC Didi. Originally designed by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnese, Domani brings to life a font that has been somewhat neglected by the digital era until now.
Brought to the attention of Jason Walcott by graphic designer Rob King, this font immediately captured Jason with its 1970s high contrast Didone style, typical of that time period. It has some unique design details that set it apart from other didone style typefaces.
“Domani” is the Italian word for “tomorrow”. The name was suggested by Rob King, and Jason felt it was perfect for this revitalized design. Walcott has created a professional quality digital version that is both faithful to the original design while expanding the character set to make use of OpenType features.
A full set of swash capitals and several swash lowercase, designed by Walcott, has been added, as well as support for Latin-based and Eastern European languages.
Ever tried to write the Helvetica by hand? We did it Supernett™!
The result is a hand-drawn Sans-Serif in Light, Regular and Bold plus Italics. All done in upper AND lower case. More than 4700 glyphs per style and several OpenType features professionally support your typographic work.
OPENTYPE FEATURE OVERVIEW More…
(→ It is deployed when an app’s all-caps styling is applied)
This feature replaces every zero with a slashed zero. (→ activate “Zero with a Slash”)
A date however, written like 10/12/2013 will remain unchanged. (→ activate “Fractions”)
Supernett is fairly condensed for space-saving headlines, a more extended version is already in the works. The extensive character set supports Central and Eastern European as well as Western European languages.
PPS: Many THX! to Cornelia Neidhardt for kindly letting me use your great drawings!
Quipo is a typeface based on our recent survey (Freeflow) on hand drawn logotypes used by American and English pop groups in the 60-70s. We thought it an interesting project and a free flow exercise to design this particular font just in capitals and well...
yes it’s rather ‘bulky’. Needless to say it comes with numbers and the normal punctuations!
Wolfsblood is a new display face by Jim Ford, adapted from hand-lettered logos spawned by punk rock bands like The Misfits and Bad Brains. The style can be traced back further to Hollywood and the explosion of low-budget exploitation, horror and sci-fi films, which also had an influence in punk rock.
Wolfsblood captures this bizarre dark-spirited lettering which has become a staple in the designer‘s work for bands and posters.
The Wolfsblood font has an expanded character set with borders, dingbats (yes, Bats!), and contextual ligatures programmed to give the typeface a random appearance by default. More…
Wolfsblood is great for logos, posters, headlines and short bits of text, and will add a fun, aggressive energy to your dark and other-worldly creations.
Marianina FY is a really big sans-serif family of 24 fonts. With its very particular inktrapes, subtle in light versions and more visible in the black ones, each roman (condensed and normal) has 6 weights and also exists in italic.
Inspired by 20th century fonts, Marianina is a perfect contemporary font family for small and big text sizes.
a really big sans-serif family of 24 fonts
Available in 6 weights and exists in italic
Lean-O FY, an original Slab-serif with asymmetrical and slightly leaned serifs. This unconventional typeface is developed in 5 styles. While the extreme weights like Thin and Black are perfectly adapted for display use, the regular weight presents a good legibility in text sizes.
Inspired by Renaissance typefaces, Gauthier FY is a contemporary old-style serif typeface with big x-heights and quite small caps. Accompanied by a lovely and detailed italic – inspired by artworks from the punchcutter Granjon – Gauthier FY is perfect for any text design.
Booster FY is a friendly round sans-serif typeface. Due to it’s large width, this is a perfect typeface for Web or other Screen Applications. If Booster FY has just one weight for the moment, the bold and light versions will join soon the family!
Beaurencourt FY is an old-fashioned script font, inspired by 19th century handwriting. This delicate and font is developed in two weights, a regular version and a light one. Initially written at small size, Beaurencourt will also work at larger sizes where it reveals the texture of ink and paper.
An old-fashioned delicate script font.
Available in two weights.
Chameleon consists of 16 fonts based on 3 completely different designs. Different but specially designed to complement each other. Together they form a well balanced design kit suitable for many different projects, e.g.
invites, menu’s, magazines, brochures, packaging, etc.
Chameleon comes in three styles: 2 outline versions and a basic (solid) version. To combine Chameleon with Chameleon Fill, you will need an application that allows you to stack text frames.
Once you start layering different fills, like a true chameleon, you can change colors and patterns. Simply place several layers on top of each other, choose from 7 fills to determine your pattern and assign a color to the fill.
Always place one of the outline versions of Chameleon on the top layer. More…
It is a charming handwritten font, which was first written out with a dip pen and ink, then scanned in and digitalized. It comes in regular and italic.
The Outline, Hatch and Solid version can be used separately, or stacked to create a shadowy or multi colored effect. On top of that, you'll find 102 glyphs of extra fun to play with in Chameleon Sketch Extra.
