While helping produce a trade magazine years ago, I admired the hand-lettering of the art director -- a woman named Marydale -- and suggested she let me model a font after her penmanship. She agreed and drew out the alphabet, and I launched an old copy of Fontographer and (to shorten a long story) ended up developing my very first digital typeface. Which has since, astonishingly, become famous worldwide. So now the real Marydale gets the mixed blessing of seeing her handwriting (and name) plastered all over the planet. Full release has regular, bold, and black weights.

Bucintoro is a modern version of the rotunda blackletter, the Gothic book hand of Italy and Spain in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. As the name implies, it's more "rotund" than the tall, angular Textur blackletter used in Germany that Gutenberg imitated. While the use of blackletter continued far into the 20th century in Germany and Scandinavia, the rotunda gave way to roman (and later also italic) letterforms in Italy, France, and Spain. It's less well known these days. Bucintoro has upper- and lowercase alphabets, numerals, punctuation, diacritics but lacks such modern characters as currency symbols. Has light, medium, and black weights.

The figures of Quartz font are based on those on digital clocks and LCD displays. All strokes are set at right angles to one another to create abstract characters. Fonts created for electronic displays gained in popularity at the same time as the computer became an everyday object. The standard is still around today and is the model for numerous interpretations. Fonts like Quartz have already won a firm position in trend typography. They embody the spirit of the late 20th century. Quartz font is a good choice whenever a marked contrast to everyday alphabets is the goal.

Disco lives on in the alphabet stylings of Reardon AOE. From its uber-fat letterforms to its hole punched counters, Reardon AOE started as a digitization of a film typeface called Joyce Black by LetterGraphics. This flashback typestyle was taken from its limited A-Z and numerals set and fleshed out to include an expanded language glyph set. Reardon AOE finds itself thrown into a late 70’s-early 80’s flashback frame of mind, appealing to all of the disco and video game typography of that time, ready to throw down the vibe for your designs.

Like traditional athletic block typefaces, VTF Charisma is built with chiseled cornersand a rigid skeleton. However, an underlying formula of fervor and functionality emerges in execution. The typeface features traditional block tendencies that are challenged by expressive angles and deviations in line weight that harken to penmanship. Uniquely tapered terminals seen in letters like "a", "c", and "s" demonstrate a strong visual energy while increasing legibility. The legs of angled letterforms like the "A", "v", and "y" are cropped in a way that further reinforces this motif. These stylistic cues are employed throughout the family’s 7 weights, ranging from Thin to Black with an accompanying Oblique variant for each. VTF Charisma is equipped with a hefty 970 glyphs that support Small Caps, fractions, extensive Latin characters, stylistic alternates and more. Paired with its dynamic charm and strong visual appearance, the family’s horizon of capabilities broadens.

Potpourri was based on an energetic alphabet written by expert calligrapher Gottfried Pott. To create the elegant yet rugged strokes, Pott cut a pen with a unique fringed tip — from a drinking straw! He then produced an huge series of drafts before deciding on the final alphabet for digitization.

Neat Hand is a neat hand-lettered sans serif font set. As their names imply Neat Hand Lower Case has a lowercase alphabet while Neat Hand Small Caps has small caps in place of the lowercase alphabet. Both fonts have the same uppercase alphabet, numbers, punctuation, symbols, and miscellaneous characters. The Neat Hand fonts are ideal for use where a neat but casual feel is desirable. Neat Hand Lower Case and Neat Hand Small Caps are to be sold only as a set priced at $20.

This illustrative alphabet was inspired by the decorations of Godfrey Sykes, whose work was greatly influenced by that of Raphael and Michelangelo. This tile alphabet follows a Venetian 16th-century tradition of letters decorated with figures symbolizing each initial, a High Renaissance style. Includes one set of A-Z ornamental initials conveniently assigned to both the upper and lower case alphabet characters. Perfect for artistic publications, storybooks, fairy tales, and texts conveying the feel of the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance.

Architype Universal is a collection of avant-garde typefaces deriving mainly from the work of artists/designers of the inter-war years, whose ideals underpin the design philosophies of the modernist movement in Europe. Their ‘universal’, ‘single alphabet’ theory limits the character sets. Architype Bayer was drawn from Bauhaus Archiv sketches for a minimal sans typeface that was created in 1925 by Herbert Bayer, based on his single-alphabet student thesis. This ‘universal’ alphabet was designed for exclusive Bauhaus use, but never cut as a typeface.

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 Morse Code numerals and alphabet in font format designed in two weights.

Yuri is a font in the Hebrew alphabet, ideal for titles and packaging.

A 1916 book entitled “Lettering” by Thomas Woods Stevens features a number of hand lettered alphabets; some plain, others unique. One of the more novel examples was designed by Harry Lawrence Gage and featured letters and numbers with a crude, wavy style described in the book as “adapted to wood block and linoleum cutting”. To keep the design as close to the original as possible, the image from the book page was auto-traced, with each character given just enough of a clean-up as to retain its own quirkiness while smoothing out any jagged lines and fixing some curves. From there, other necessary characters were created for the digital font, and the end result is Tenement JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

A bit of experimentation with the Art Deco-flavored Sign Card JNL brings forth a hybrid alphabet where Art Deco meets Western. The result is Kalvesta JNL. This font's unusual character shapes defy and yet redefine the notion of the classic Western alphabet. The name is from a town in Kansas.

Eckhardt Fancy JNL was named in honor of Al Eckhardt (1929-2005), a talented sign painter and good friend of font designer Jeff Levine. The design was inspired by a vintage alphabet found within a collection of decorative display alphabets from the type collection of the late Dan X. Solo.

Architype Universal is a collection of avant-garde typefaces deriving mainly from the work of artists/designers of the inter-war years, whose ideals underpin the design philosophies of the modernist movement in Europe. Their ‘universal’, ‘single alphabet’ theory limits the character sets. Architype Bayer-type is based upon Herbert Bayer’s 1931 universal, modern serifed alphabet. Although the ‘modern’ style appears to be a radical departure from his first sans single alphabet of 1925, the structure of this later serifed style is still grid based and geometrically constructed.

New formula for an alphabet: unicase + monowidth. Realized in an exceptional diversity of styles.

Broxa was designed with a flat brush and inspired by Roman Sans Serif Alphabet

Curly dotted and serifed alphabet perfect for adding a touch of quirk or whimsy.

Inspired by the lettering on a perfume, Halmos extrapolated a complete uppercase alphabet, and he also created a matching lowercase. Now the character set has been expanded completely, and this stylish Art Deco font is ready to create some headlines, new logos and wordmarks in many more languages. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

You can read more about how to use this font and how it works here. This font lets you write in accurate Tengwar (elvish) quickly and easily. While writing his Middle Earth books, JRR Tolkein invented an entire alphabet for the elves called Tengwar. His attention to detail was incredible, Tengwar is a fully functioning writing system. This is the famous Elvish writing seen all through Lord of The Rings and the Hobbit. Tengwar is an alphabet, not a language, and can be used to write many languages. Tolkein gave detailed notes on how to write English in the Tengwar alphabet. This font uses advanced font features (contextual alternates, ligatures and kerning) to automatically convert any English text, as you type, into an accurate representation in the elvish Tengwar alphabet.

Gothic Gothic is a fusion of old and new that is both Gothic and Gothic. In typography Gothic can refer to German Blackletter or Old English styles. Gothic can also mean block or sans serif style lettering. By combining and balancing the elements from both of these ideas we have created a contemporary extended block letter typeface. The Gothic Gothic family contains 2 companion fonts. Gothic Gothic Text is a more minimal variation that has a more roman looking style while still retaining some Blackletter feel. Gothic Gothic Black is a bolder version designed to tend more toward the Blackletter style of Gothic with more contrast of stroke and a few of the more unusual Blackletter forms thrown in for flavor. Gothic Gothic has been honored with an award of Excellence in Type Design from Association Typographique International (ATypI) in 2001. Typeco has updated this font and has released it as an expanded family. Gothic Gothic is a crepuscular family of 3 fonts

Kiddie Blokz JNL is a limited character set font in three styles: Regular, Lined and Block, emulating the look of toy blocks for themes with a juvenile motif. For a companion font to set regular copy, use Roughshod JNL.

This font was inspired by the mountains of Altay. Soft lines and a little asymmetry add a natural touch to Sungent. This font will help add authenticity and personality to your digital work. Contains over 1500 kerning pairs. Language support: Contains full set of Latin alphabet, including diacritical marks for European languages and Cyrillic alphabets.

Display Grungy is a display font not intended for text use. It was designed specifically for display, headline, logotype, branding, and similar applications. Display Grungy has an uppercase alphabet located under the character + shift keys and a lowercase alphabet of small caps located under the character set keys. It also has numbers and punctuation.

If you build a block, they will come.

Blast your way through the alphabet with this stunning font from Comicraft's work on THE PUNISHER!

Blast your way through the alphabet with this stunning font from Comicraft's work on THE PUNISHER!

Initially commissioned in the summer of 2009 for a popular North American ice cream parlor chain we cannot name, Tuba started with a reconceptualization of a somewhat flawed '72 alphabet idea by Swiss graphic designer Erwin Poell. During the back-and-forth of the custom project, other ideas seeped into the design, mostly from other Canada Type fonts, like Fab, Jonah, Jojo and Teaspoon. The end result was what the client called a "sugar circuit trigger alphabet". This now is the retail version of that project. Tuba's main style is a straight-forward mix of 60s/70s art nouveau ideas and late-70s/early-80s tube aesthetic. The Highlight and Outline styles are almost necessary spinoffs for this kind of typeface. And the all-caps Black style is a nod to the fat font fad of the past couple of years. All styles contain many alternates – so many that each style is almost two fonts in one. Make sure to check out the character sets for a few nice and useful surprises. Life's too short. Seek sweetness. Get gooey.

Wien Pro, the sans serif by Ekke Wolf. Typeface lovers looking for a modern, well-developed sans serif font with a touch of retro and warm, individual lettering will get excited about a new addition to the font market. The more than complete Wien Pro front comes in three styles and four different weights. In addition to the upright Wien Pro there is the Wien Pro Oblique with a moderate 6° slant and the Wien Pro Superoblique with an 18° slant. Available weights are light, regular, medium, bold and black. These fonts are equipped with extended Latin alphabet for Central and Eastern Europe and also Cyrillic and Greek alphabet. The set of characters includes nine different sets of numbers, plus its own set for the small caps, as well as alternative characters and groovy ligatures. In addition, all Wien Pro styles are also available as unicase with upper case and lower case x-height alignment. The style, metrics and proportions of Wien Pro combine perfectly with the Liebelei Pro and the script fonts of the Calafati Pro.

A small book entitled “Portfolio of Alphabet Designs for Artists, Architects, Designers & Craftsmen” [published in 1938 by Irene K. Ames] contained a number of pages displaying hand lettered alphabet examples. One sample in particular stood out for its bold Art Deco look and unusual design. This is now available as Dance Moderne JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Spotlight was created by British designer Tony Geddes in the tradition of the bold serif fonts of early 19th century England. It too is a robust alphabet exhibiting extreme stroke contrasts, however, Geddes gave his font a more relaxed feel by not filling in the strokes completely. Long white rays break up the otherwise dark black strokes, following the form of the outer contours and giving the figures a three dimensional look. Spotlight is also reminiscent of the decorative advertisements of the 1930s and of the glamorous revues and shows of this time. Spotlight is perfect for headlines and display in larger point sizes.

Salas is a fun, chunky, slab serif omnicase display font. It's blocky and loud, so it can scream from Posters and Headlines. Think of a clown with poor hearing making a Skype call, he's shouting, but you like it. Anyway: it has over 300 glyphs, several variations on the standard alphabet and lots of those extra foreign features for sending international ransom notes. OpenType coded, it has various letter pairings that interlock automatically to create a more randomized, bespoke feel to your copy. It also has some extra characters available directly through your glyphs palette. Play around with it, I hope you like it.

MTT Roma is designed to re-create the atmosphere of the city of Rome of the 21st century. The studio for the letterform evolved from the Trajan Column alphabet. Suitable for both display and body-text usage, stylistically MTT Roma aims to distance itself from the proliferation of geometric sans-serif families of its time. The result is a sharp, subtly humanist typeface inspired by modern day Rome, the city of contrasts and eternal beauty. Featuring an extended character set to support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European languages, the typeface comes with six weights – from thin to black — with matching italics.

Lucida Grande is a humanist sans serif font with a large x-height, clear letterforms, and space-saving economy. Its easy reading qualities make it legible for printing and screen displays even down to small sizes. Lucida Grande is part of the Lucida superfamily of fonts from Bigelow & Holmes. Lucida is highly regarded for legibility and its extensive range of type styles. The Lucida Grande family has eight fonts with weights from Thin to Black with matching italics. Each font has 674 glyphs and supports the W1G character set. This includes Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets to support many languages in Europe, the Americas, and worldwide.