Kanona JNL is modeled from one of the numerous alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times magazine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Thanks to a wealth of source material provided by Tod Swormstedt of ST Media (and who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio), Jeff Levine has been redrawing many of these alphabets and presenting them in digital form. The original variations in letter widths from Becker’s hand-painted alphabet have been left intact.

The inspiration for SJURecord was calligraphic lettering used for the title of a student newspaper, St. John’s Record, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The three upper-case and nine lower-case letters were considerably different from any calligraphic lettering I had developed, so I thought creating a complete typeface around these twelve letters would be an interesting challenge. The SJCRecord family has four members: regular, oblique, shadowed, and oblique shadowed. There are alternate letters for A, J, L, S, V, W, and X.

German Designer Klaus Sutter digitized Bazar, a brush script typeface from the 1950s originally drawn by Imre Reiner (1900-1987) and published in 1956 by D. Stempel AG. Bazar is a calligraphic brush type free from accurate horizontal and vertical strokes and a contrast to the objective body type. It has a more static character and could be perfectly applied in headlines or as a figurative word mark. Like tradional chinese calligraphers, Imre Reiner was also a painter; this is reflected in the glyphs of Bazar.

In most cities during the 1950s and 1960s the corner pharmacy or soda shop was a mainstay of teenage life. It was a place to hang out with friends, hear the latest hits on the jukebox and indulge in everything sugary from malted milkshakes to banana splits. During this time, a popular form of window advertising was supplied by the Coca-Cola Company to promote its product being served by these locations. Specialty window decals designed to emulate drawn (raised) Venetian blinds "bookmarked" by the soda's logo were adhered to the shop's windows, with a space provided to add in customized lettering. The store's name or its specialties were applied to each window pane, and this formed a consistent border at the top of all of the shop's windows. Although few visual images exist of this specific bit of advertising nostalgia, an old record album by a late-1950s singer named Chip Fisher called "Chipper at the Sugar Bowl" provided a somewhat usable sample for what is now Soda Fountain JNL.

Bellwood Gothic™ is an unorthodox but happy pairing of upper and lowercases that breaks typographic rules: its capitals evoke traditional early 20th century styling and strength. Lowercase displays a softer, more warm and friendly flavor that points to a Bauhaus aesthetic. But for some strange reason they work so well together! Therein lies the mystique of this font. Overall it isn’t strictly uniform in stroke but shows some variation of color. The sofa poster includes a cameo appearance by breauhare’s own popular Daddy’s Hand™ font. Bellwood Gothic’s nostalgic flavor of the 1960s & 1970s still conveys a modern look that lends itself to sports, fashion, lifestyle and more. The wide track of the lettering helps short words easily fill spaces. Includes stylistic alternates for the lowercase a, e, & l (L), plus 13 uppercase letters! Among OpenType features are Stylistic Alternates, Stylistic Sets, Ligatures, Fractions, & Case-sensitive forms. Extended support for Western, Central, and Eastern European languages is included. Use it for headlines, subheads, branding, editorial, packaging, and logos!

Lugano has it’s inspiration in 1920s advertising material and is ideal for lively banner lettering, posters and cover design. Four typefaces are offered - Lugano comes in regular, alternate, striped and alternate striped forms. Try it out and inject a little fun into your work today!

A package for a swim mask and snorkel was the basis for this decidedly unusual typeface with a wild 1970s-era design. There's no telling how to apply this font to a project, but think black light posters, psychedelic music and some cheap wine!

This unusual headline font is based on lettering found on a travel poster, advertising passage to Morocco on the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée line, designer unknown, circa 1930. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

Dutch type designer Max Kisman created this display FontFont in 1990. The font is ideally suited for advertising and packaging and poster and billboards. FF Vortex provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures and case-sensitive forms. It comes with proportional oldstyle figures.

Hayfork JNL is based on a vintage wood type sanserif typeface from the 1880's. A font of similar design is Eckhardt Poster Display, which was modeled from a 1920's sign painter's handbook; no doubt getting its inspiration from this wood type's design.

Ray Cruz releases another typeface family, this time inspired by 1970's pop culture. Fat Albert Regular, Outline and Shadow are bold poster types that evoke the fun and funk of an era gone by. Go on bro, get Fat Albert and get down.

Art Nouveau typeface ‘Secessionist’ draws inspiration from Wiener Secessionist Joseph Maria Olbrich's handwriting, as seen on his architectural drawings from the 1920’s. You can use these fonts to create posters, greeting cards, scrapbooks, CD labels, T-shirts, coffee mugs, digital videos websites and banners.

Inspired by the hand lettering found on a 1930s travel poster promoting visits to India, this bold sans serif Art Deco type design feature incised lines and a stylized A,E,F and S. World Travel JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Folk Singer JNL was modeled after a 1960s lettering stencil, which was in turn designed as a variation on the ever-popular Ad Lib.

Sunfleur is a high dose of peace and love. With flared edges and rounded terminals, its playful forms were inspired by the flower child style of the 1960s. The waxing and waning curves of the letters complement each other for optimal readability and flow. Sunfleur also features a series of happy flower icons. Bring positive energy to logos, headlines, packaging, editorial, and posters. Includes all uppercase characters with punctuation, glyphs, diacritics, numerals, icons, and multilingual support.

Power, speed and modern creature comforts characterized rail travel in the 1930s. To reflect those characteristics, legendary French poster artist A. M. Cassandre employed strong graphic elements and a chiaroscuro letter treatment to the 1939 poster lettering that inspired this font. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

These are curly designs arranged into fanciful snowflakes, evoking 1960’s psychedelia as well as Victorian romanticism. An excellent choice for any winter holiday material.

Fette Deutsche Schrift also known as Koch-Fraktur or Kochschrift was created by Rudolf Koch for Klingspor foundry between 1908 and 1910. The basis of this font is a publication in the magazine “Das Plakat” of September 1921. The font contains swash capitals to use as dropcaps, contextual alternates, glyphs for line endings, ligatures, discretional ligatures for use in German, ornaments and other OpenType features. It supports all the European languages using Latin alphabets (including slashed S and slashed long s used in Latvian old orthography till 1930s).

Alexandrya is a subtly modulated block serif font family with a humanist sensibility and all of my personal style for font design. A distant ancestor of the basic letterforms is Minister (a German font of the 1920s) through my first font in the mid-1990s, Diaconia. There are many OpenType features with over 600 characters: Caps, lower case, small caps, ligatures, discretionary ligatures, swashes, small cap figures, old style figures, numerators, denominators, accent characters (including CE), ordinal numbers (1st-infinity: lining and oldstyle), and so on. It is designed for text use in body copy.

Alphaluxe is a distinctive new typeface from Wesley Poole of Hawai’i. This vertical script packs a velvet punch. It compels attention like the best of the futuristic Moderne scripts from the 1930s, (refined by the 1950s) with none of the bulk. The shapes are strong, their rendering light. Fortunately, Mr. Poole can't break his addiction to elegance and sophistication. It's a classy alphabet. but not self-conscious or stereotypical. Contributing mightily to this effort is Rod Cavazos (Psy/Ops, San Francisco). Among today's typefaces, Alphaluxe is a rare achievement.

The vast resource of hand lettered vintage sheet music titles offers many interesting and unique variations on even the simplest styles of lettering. A simple thick-and-thin serif design circa the 1920s-1930s evokes a reminiscence of the Art Nouveau period combined with a touch of what was to come during the Art Deco era. Most charming is the fact this lettering is free of the formal rules and constraints of metal type, where designers are generally forced into conformity with uniform stroke widths, serif placements and character shapes.

The calligraphy font Banner was designed by Martin Wait in 1986 and mixes the character of the 1940s with that of the 1980s in its forms. The round and somewhat reserved lower case letters make a balanced basis for the generous capitals. Black outer contours surround a white inner area and are heavier on the right side of the figures, making the characters look as though they have shadows. Banner should be used in point sizes of 18 and larger and is meant for lighthearted short texts or headlines.

Wavelength is a unique sans serif family of five weights and italics. For all of it's unusual detailing and arc-shaped strokes, this typeface is a solid workhorse, and is highly legible at all sizes. It's an excellent starting point for a unique logotype or offbeat headline, and is able to cross genres and styles because of its essential letterform simplicity. Wavelength is contemporary, but with a nod to 1930s art deco, streamline, and even 1990s tech futurism. It's great all-arounder that works well with shadows, outlines, extrusions added within vector editing programs.

An original typeface designed for ParaType in 2004 by Armenian designer Manvel Shmavonyan. Based on the lettering created in 1970s by outstanding Armenian type designer Henrik Mnatsakanyan (1923-2001) of the same name. In Armenian ‘Haverj’ means ‘Eternally’. The face resembles many regular text serif fonts but elements like serifs and terminals make it eccentric and a little bit funny. The shape of diagonal legs in capital K and R resembles book lettering of the 1950s—60s. Using it in text, advertising and display typography may lead to surprising effects.

Retro-futuristic robot terminal type. The 1930s Moderne Streamline decade meets the digital domain in this weird font. Use it in an ad for Ford Tri-Motor Airplane or a story about an out of control 1980s computer monster. Which? Help it find its place- as it is lost in time. Digideco is a minimal font set that includes upper and lowercase letterforms which can be used at various sizes but, we consider it a headline/display font, best applied larger than 36 points in size. Shall we play a game?

Block-style typefaces make excellent sports-themed fonts, and Stadium JNL is no exception-- but this lettering style is also filled with nostalgia for decades past. Modeled from one of the many classic designs found in the Speedball® Lettering Textbook, this style of alphabet was quite popular in signage of the 1920s and 1930s. Stadium JNL fills the bill either way-- a font that is just as much at home on a gridiron or baseball diamond, or as lettering for a garage, warehouse or attention-getting ad copy.

An interesting hand lettered example of Art Deco lettering (minus the letter ‘L’) was spotted on Pinterest and served as the inspiration for Deco Sketch JNL. Because there was no attribution as to the age or source of the alphabet, it can only be surmised that it was a scan from a 1930s or 1940s source. The original showed many of the irregularities of pen lettering, and had rounded terminals. The digital version has been redrawn more uniformly with flat terminals. Deco Sketch JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Dutch type designer Max Kisman created this display FontFont in 1990. The family contains 2 weights and is ideally suited for poster and billboards and sports. FF Scratch provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures and case-sensitive forms. It comes with proportional lining figures.

A 1940s travel poster for the Florida East Coast Railway (which then carried passengers but is now a freight line) had the railroad’s name hand lettered in a bold Art Deco sans. This inspired Passenger Train JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Roberta goes back to the old poster fonts of the 1930s. It is an excellent alternative and combination to fonts like Arnold Böcklin or Hobo. Ralph M. Unger redrew and digitized this font in 2003. His work is based on artwork taken from old font catalogs.

Designed by Jakob Erbar and released in 1930, Koloss is a headline face that works well for posters. Characters have been drawn with a broad nib leaving small counters. This gives the effect of a compressed face, although the width of the strokes imply a fat face.

Handlettering on a 1930s travel poster for the Canadian Pacific Railway provided the pattern for this distinctive Deco typeface. A strong dropshadow treatment has been added so you can create can't-miss headlines easily. Both versions of the font contain characters to support all major European languages.

Inspired by the art deco movement in France at the turn of the last century and in United States in the 1930s. Boasting over 500 glyphs, with its multiple ligature sets and alternatives, this is a wonderful typeface to use on posters, magazines and on promotional collateral!

The above-the-store signage for many newspaper stands, soda shops, candy stores, luncheonettes and pharmacies of the 1950s and early 1960s were what was referred to as “privilege signs” provided by one of the major cola brands. Consisting of the brand’s emblems on the left and right, the remainder of the sign would carry the desired message of the storekeeper (such as “Candy – Soda – Newspapers”) in prismatic, embossed metal letters. Inspired by these vintage signs, Privilege Sign JNL recreates the condensed sans serif lettering style in both regular and oblique versions. The typefaces are solid black, but adding a selected color and a prismatic effect from your favorite graphics program can reproduce the look and feel of those old businesses.

Hamptons BF is a beautiful, elegant sans serif with dramatic individuality. A font that steps out in Art Deco style. As a design movement Art Deco came into prominence during the 1920s and 30s when forms were typically sleek, symmetrical, geometric or highly stylized. Today the influence of this enduring style can be clearly seen in architecture, industrial design, fashion, art, graphic design, and yes, even type design. Art Deco style exemplifies luxury, glamour and modernity. I believe Hamptons BF captures something of that retro look in a nod to the past without ever looking dated, all the while retaining a contemporary flair. Named after the well-known New York resorts synonymous with style and elegance, this gothic or sans serif type is based upon University Roman, an early 1970s serif design which in turn was influenced by yet another serif design called Forum Flair (late 1960s); and that in turn owes its pedigree to the late 1930s’ Stunt Roman, which is the original source of inspiration for all of these. Quite a family tree! There’s dynamic interplay between certain wide, full-round letters such as C, D, G, O, P, Q, R, S and narrow ones like A, E, F, H, K, L, M, N, U, etc. This contrast repeats throughout certain lower case letters and serves to create a unique look of distinction. Light and Regular weights communicate a romantic, feminine appeal while the Bold offers a complementary emphasis. The font is somewhat versatile as in addition to its primary purpose for display, Hamptons BF also succeeds in settings containing short blocks of large text. It’s right at home in a variety of typographic environments: branding, packaging, signage logos, magazine headlines, invitations, menus, trendy cafes and more. Among the included OpenType features are Stylistic Alternates, Automatic Ligatures and Fractions. There is extended language support for Western, Central and Eastern Europe and Turkish.

Some Impko decal letters and numbers with a "college look" from the 1960s were the inspiration for designing "Forward Passed JNL"; Jeff Levine's second sports-themed font.