Arsis is a condesed modern headline face that was originally produced and cast in hot metal by the Dutch type foundry Lettergieterij Amsterdam. The Arsis font family was designed by Gerry Powell in 1937. Arsis is a Serif (Antiqua) Modern Style font. Arsis font family attributes include roman serif, Didone, elegant, formal, modern style, feminine.

A 'quick' font, originally made for the 25th anniversary of SSP Printing Co. in Amsterdam. First used for an intro spread in Wired Magazine (#3.05, May 1995): "The problem with computers is that they don't have enough Africa in them. What's pissing me off is that they use so little of my body" (Brian Eno).

Transylvanian punchcutter Nicholas Kis cut a leading figure in 18th century Amsterdam. Series of his matrices survived at the Ehrhardt typefoundry. From these Chauncey Griffith at Mergenthaler cut the Janson series in 1936. Morison at Monotype followed with Ehrhardt. David Berlow takes full advantage of current techniques to produce these splendid and adventurous display series to complement one of the great oldstyle texts; FB 2007

Louise font was based on the art of Louise Marie (lou) Loeber, a Dutch painter. She was born in Amsterdam in 1894 and flirted with several styles like De Stijl, Cubism and Bauhaus. Her artworks are characterized by a sober use of geometric shapes; lines, rectangles and triangles. Louise font consists of Caps, but the lower and upper case glyphs are quite different. Louise comes with extensive language support.

This typeface is an amalgam of Edwardian and Art Deco letterforms: the lowercase letters come from a turn-of-the-twentieth-century typeface named Amsterdam, and the uppercase letterforms come from a 1930s logotype for the Théâtre Moderne in Paris. Like its namesake, this typeface is not easily overlooked. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

Leighton is a four-weight serif font family that was created in 1993 by Paul Hickson (P&P Hickson) and Steve Jackaman (ITF) exclusively for ITF’s Red Rooster Collection. Its designs are loosely based on the typeface Lectura, which was designed in 1966 by Dick Dooijes for the Amsterdam Foundry. Leighton is a conservative, demi-serif font in a Dutch style. It is ideal for upscale corporate projects and excels at any size.

In the old Amsterdam neighborhood of 'De Jordaan', you will find a canal called Bloemgracht (Flower Canal). For many years, a coffee store called Schildmeijer could be found here. Their paper coffee bags and advertisements sported a hand made font which I have tried to recreate and the result is Bloemgracht typeface. It is an all caps art deco font, quite angular, but very legible and distinct. Bloemgracht comes with extensive language support.

Eh, what's up, Doc? This cuddly little oddball of a typeface was originally released under the rather unlikely name of Hercules by the Amsterdam Typefoundry in 1926. This face includes OpenType Stylistic Alternates for b, h, h, k and l, which feature very tall ascenders with a "bunny ear" vibe. Both versions include the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets, as well as localization for Moldovan and Romanian.

The Quickstep Bold, a 'quick' font, originally made for the 25th anniversary of SSP Printing Co. in Amsterdam. First used for an intro spread of a Brian Eno quote in Wired Magazine (#3.05, May 1995): "The problem with computers is that they don't have enough Africa in them. What's pissing me off is that they use so little of my body". For a less outspoken expression, the Quickstep Sans was developed later.

Artù ! Strano ma vero, strange but true. A beautiful, intelligent and lively Italian dog and a great friend, unfortunately no longer among us ... but his memory lingers. A typeface designed in Rosennano (Tuscany), its Italian, but executed in Amsterdam. This monospace typeface might prove to be extremely useful for household products like washing powder or any anything like that. Just use it in your designs, let it live! Concept/Art Direction/Design: André Toet © 2017

The Vondelpark is the famous Amsterdam city park, 47 hectares stretching out from Leidseplein to the Amstelveenseweg. It was founded in 1864 when a group of well-to-do Amsterdam citizens got together and bought land at the (then) edge of the city centre in order to create a park ‘for riding and strolling’. Designed by architect J.D. Zocher, it opened officially in 1865. The park received its name two years later when a statue of Dutch writer Joost van den Vondel was placed in the park. In the 1960s and 1970s the Vondelpark became a symbol and epicenter of the hippie flower power era. The park was declared a state monument in 1996. Donald DBXL was intrigued by the handmade iron nameplate lettering on the park’s entrance gates, and decided to design VLNL Vondelpark in its glory. The somewhat clumsy iron letters were not revived as is but optimized to turn it into a useful typeface. The all-caps serif with a deliberate constructed feel, contains a Positional Open Type feature that places half circles on the vertical stems, at the beginning and end of a word, to enliven the rhythm.

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!

This font was inspired by the well-known philosopher René Descartes' hand writing. In 1634, from Amsterdam, he wrote a famous letter to his friend Mersenne, a great scientist monk, in which he spoke about Gallileus works. The greatest part of our glyphs is based on this document. We have added some letters Descartes himself didn't use, like modern s and j (he used exclusively s long and i instead of j). A lot of ligatures and alternates are enriching the font, giving a better appearance of real handwriting.

Henri Abraham Chatelain was a cartographer and publisher of the famous Atlas Historique, ou Nouvelle Introduction a L'Histoire, a world atlas released between 1705 and 1732 in Amsterdam. A few years ago, at an antique book shop in London, I bought a page from Chatelain's atlas—a page covering the Near East, India, the Indian Ocean—that had a particularly alluring, oblique handlettering style. The text is in French, which gave me plenty of samples of diacritics and accented characters. The overall effect is neat and legible, with a distinctly historical flair.

HERENGRACHT (Patricians' Canal or Lord’s Canal) is the first of the three major canals in the city centre of Amsterdam. The canal is named after the heren regeerders who governed the city in the 16th and 17th century. The most fashionable part is called the Golden Bend, with many double wide mansions, inner gardens and coach houses on Keizersgracht. Former bureau of André Toet (SO)Design was situated there for over 32 years, it was about time to name one of our fonts to: HERENGRACHT. Concept/Art Direction/Design: André Toet © 2017

This family was inspired from the set of font faces used in Amsterdam by Daniel Elzevir to print the famous “Tractatus de corde...” the study on earth anatomy by Richard Lower, in 1669. The punch cutter was the famous Dutch Kristoffel Van Dijk. In our two styles (Normal & Italic), font faces, 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. The Roman (Normal) style contains a U stylistic alternate, and the Italique style A.

Donald DBXL Beekman needed a break. And he took it too. While sitting there consuming a sandwich and a half-pint of milk, he took up his ruler and pencil. By the time there was no milk left and only some bread crumbs remained on his plate, VLNL Breakz was finished. That’s DBXL for you. Get your letters during your break. VLNL Breakz was originally designed as the headline and logo font for the breakdance competition Amsterdam Breakz, but turned out to be very versatile. It has 4 variations, Regular and Condensed widths / Bold and Light weights.

The gifted Hungarian punch-cutter and printer Miklós Kis was active in Amsterdam in the 1680s. Among the many fonts that he cut during those years were a ‘mediaen’ (pica-sized) roman and italic, and the digital Miklós fonts are an interpretation of these ‘mediaen’ types. The character set has been extended to cover all the European languages that use the Latin alphabet, and the fonts offer OpenType features such as small capitals; old-style and lining figures, both proportional and tabular; fractions; superior and inferior numbers; superior alphabet; contextual and stylistic alternates; and intelligent application of long ‘s’.

Adams is a revival and major expansion of Dolf Overbeek's Studio typeface and Flambard, its bold counterpart, originally published by the Amsterdam Type Foundry in 1946 and 1954. This digital version adds small caps and a new light weight. Adams is a simple upright, flat brush script, with stroke angles carefully designed to give the same color in all sizes. It is reminiscent of the sign lettering commonly found in the 1930s and 1940s. The Adams fonts are available in all popular font formats, and the character sets cover a wide range of codepages, including Central and Eastern European languages, Esperanto, Turkish, Baltic, Celtic/Welsh.

This fantastic beautiful Amsterdam School fonts brings alive the roaring twenties and crashing thirties. An art deco typeface from the Netherlands that summons a thirties vibe for a nostalgic twist on chic lines. It's the work of designer Leon Hulst, and you can see from the layout examples here that nostalgia means ruin, and it has become super cool to use a ruin vibe in retro aesthetics. Yep, there's a touch of class to that worn out look and feel, and the beautiful lines of the typography and numerals show how the barely restrained charisma of art deco can be coupled with the new obsession with all things vintage.

The Bitstream version of Linotype Janson. Nicholas Kis (Miklos Kis) was a Hungarian punchcutter who worked in Amsterdam. His types are some of the greatest in the Dutch old face style and have been used as models for a number of developments in this century. The Linotype version of this style, Janson, was created by Chauncey H.Griffith in 1937 and based on an original face cut by Kis in 1670–90. The face is named after Anton Janson, a Dutchman who worked in Leipzig, with whom the face has no connection. The typeface is used for text setting. Cyrillic version was developed at ParaType in 2001 by Vladimir Yefimov.

Originally created with cutting in red litho film, as a headlining typeface for Vinyl music magazine. Its geometric structure was very applicable for early type design experiments on the computer. ...in the early 1980s, he (Max Kisman) became the designer of a small, independent music magazine Vinyl. This Amsterdam-based publication was set up very much as a response to the innovative British magazine, The Face. Responding to Neville Brody's radical designs for that magazine, Kisman began to experiment by creating new headline typefaces for each issue... (Emily King. New Faces: type design in the first decade of device-independent digital typesetting. 1987-1997.

Richard Lipton designed Meno in 1994 as a modest yet elegant workhorse serif family in seven styles. In 2016, he expanded this spirited oldstyle into a 78–style superfamily. The romans gain their energy from French baroque forms cut late in the 16th century by Robert Granjon, the italics from Dirk Voskens’ work in 17th-century Amsterdam. Meno consists of three carefully drawn optical sizes—Text, Display, and Banner, with Condensed and Extra Condensed widths added to the latter two cuts. Steadfast in text settings, Meno is replete with alternate forms, swashes, and other enhancements that showcase Lipton’s masterful calligraphic hand. The series offers a complete solution for achieving high-end editorial typography.

Richard Lipton designed Meno in 1994 as a modest yet elegant workhorse serif family in seven styles. In 2016, he expanded this spirited oldstyle into a 78–style superfamily. The romans gain their energy from French baroque forms cut late in the 16th century by Robert Granjon, the italics from Dirk Voskens’ work in 17th-century Amsterdam. Meno consists of three carefully drawn optical sizes—Text, Display, and Banner, with Condensed and Extra Condensed widths added to the latter two cuts. Steadfast in text settings, Meno is replete with alternate forms, swashes, and other enhancements that showcase Lipton’s masterful calligraphic hand. The series offers a complete solution for achieving high-end editorial typography.

P22 CoDependent is a revival of the Independant typeface from 1930 created by Dutch designer Johannes Nicolaas Coenraad Collette along with Jos Dufour from Belgium. Independant was released in metal by the Belgian division of the Amsterdam Type Foundry in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the independence of Belgium from the Netherlands. Despite the name, the two fonts contained in the set, Regular and Shadow, are not codependent upon each other. They can be used alone, but together they can create a dynamic two-color option. There have been other fonts inspired by and revived directly from Independant, but this version adheres the original design with the added consideration of how the shadow version will overlap.

Richard Lipton designed Meno in 1994 as a modest yet elegant workhorse serif family in seven styles. In 2016, he expanded this spirited oldstyle into a 78–style superfamily. The romans gain their energy from French baroque forms cut late in the 16th century by Robert Granjon, the italics from Dirk Voskens’ work in 17th-century Amsterdam. Meno consists of three carefully drawn optical sizes—Text, Display, and Banner, with Condensed and Extra Condensed widths added to the latter two cuts. Steadfast in text settings, Meno is replete with alternate forms, swashes, and other enhancements that showcase Lipton’s masterful calligraphic hand. The series offers a complete solution for achieving high-end editorial typography.

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. The Fodor letterforms were created for the magazine published by Museum Fodor, Amsterdam. To save cost it was designed to be ‘typeset’ on their own electric typewriter. The resulting monospaced effect was combined with a background of orange overlaid with pink dots that provided a page grid to align the text to. The title set on the dot matrix formed the 'system' for construction of the ‘digital effect’ letterforms. Now Architype Fodor recreates these letterforms as a truly digital font.

Duct tape is one of the most versatile adhesive materials known today. From fixing the bumper of your car that keeps falling off, to creating a sturdy wallet. From alternative wrapping to sticking a friend to the wall, Duct tape is there. And it will stay there. It will stick to anything and hold for a very darn long time too! The cloth-backed tape was invented some time during World War II, and also proved itself useful as a base material for lettering. VLNL Duct was originally designed by DBXL as a logo for temporary Amsterdam restaurant BAUT. DBXL imagined an owner taping the name on the window of his shop using Duct tape. The font was used for all communication of the restaurant. Duct is a sturdy, rough all-caps typeface that will stick to anything.

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. Stedelijk first appeared in the seminal Vormgevers poster, commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1968. Crouwel created a rigid grid system across the poster of 57 vertical by 41 horizontal lines, also forming the basis for the construction of the letterforms. Although all hand drawn, the resulting typeface had a machine-made appearance. This striking black and white poster with its visible grid became one of Crouwel's most iconic designs. Architype Stedelijk now re-creates these letterforms as a single alphabet typeface in a digital font.

Donald DBXL Beekman lives on a ship in Amsterdam’s waters (well, the Amstel river, actually). Living on the water inspired him to design this ‘cruise ship’ typeface VLNL Decks. Available in several variations, it’s a fabulous cocktail of freshly caught fish typography. Decks is recommended for seafood restaurants, speed boats as well as slick city boys wearing overly expensive sunglasses or Ibiza sunset parties. Decks is the tiger prawn amidst sea foods. VLNL Decks has a distinct modern techno look but the rounded corners give it a warm and human feel. It is available in 3 monolinear weights (Light, Medium, Bold) and 3 weights with contrast between horizontals and verticals (Different Light, Different Medium, Different Bold).

I was inspired by the letters of the mythical “Ideales” tobacco package, designed in 1936 in Barcelona by Carlos Vives, director of the designers studio of the Rieusset graphical industry. We have also studied other geometrical models from the 1920s, to be highlighted among them the alphabet drawn by Cornelis André Vlaanderen at Amsterdam in 1928, which would have been very probably the inspiration for the famous tobacco package. Eutopia has been born with the aim to be useful for the current graphic communications. For that purpose almost 400 glyphs have been designed and more than 2200 kerning pairs have been defined. The multiple diacritic signs have been prepared to allow a multilingual use in most of the languages based on Latin alphabet. The OpenType features have been used to get alternate characters of “A” and “g”, and also ligatures, lowercase numbers and other typographic refinements.

Minuet, an informal script with crossover deco elements giving it an unmistakable 1940s flavor, is a revival and expansion of the Rondo family, the last typeface drawn by Stefan Schlesinger before his death. This family was initially supposed to be a typeface based on the strong, flowing script Schlesinger liked to use in the ads he designed, particularly the ones he did for Van Houten’s cocoa products. But for technical reasons the Lettergieterij Amsterdam mandated the face to be made from unattached letters, rather than the original connected script. Schlesinger and Dooijes finished the lowercase and the first drawings of the uppercase just before Schlesinger was sent to a prison camp in 1942. Dooijes completed the design on his own, and drew the bold according to Schlesigner’s instructions. The typeface family was finished in February of 1944, and Schlesinger was killed in October of that same year. Though he did see and approve the final proofs, he never actually saw his letters in use. It took almost four more years for the Lettergieterij Amsterdam to produce the fonts. The typeface was officially announced in November of 1948, and immediately became a bestseller. By 1966, according to a memo from the foundry, the typeface had become “almost too popular”. This digital version of Schlesigner’s and Dooijes’s work greatly expands on the metal fonts. Both weights include a complete set of lowercase alternates — based on Schlesinger’s own drawings, as well as alternative variations for some of the capitals, a few ligatures, and extended language support covering Western, Eastern and Central European languages, plus Baltic, Celtic/Welsh, Esperanto, Maltese and Turkish. Minuet is available in all popular formats. The OpenType version, Minuet Pro, takes advantage of internal font programming to combine the main and alternate fonts into a single file per weight, making all alternates and ligatures automatically available at the push of a button in OpenType supporting programs.

Strak is a font that was born out of admiration for the work of E. Vermeulen, a Belgian artist known for his tight, precise line and an unseen masterpiece that is spread around the world. He has published and exhibited his work in London, Liverpool, Angoulême, New York, Geneva, Amsterdam, Lyon and Turku (in Finland) and he even signed for the New York Times. Based on a few characters, a complete font was composed by Kustomtype. After a few sketches, Strak came to life. The name Strak, in this case, refers to the slender, beautiful woman with the correct waistlines and proportions. The font is designed this way; it is completely hand-drawn, digitized and can be used in all modern and graphic media. Strak is available in 8 different styles, has class and will make many people's mouth water when they see it on your designs. Do you want quality and style? Then Strak is the font-perfect solution!

Exuberantly delicious and lusciously sweet! VLNL Bon Bon embodies the perfect after dinner treat. Chocolate is a known aphrodisiac and bonbons are its most romantic carrier. Bonbon is not for nothing the French word for ‘good’ twice! You could definitely consider VLNL Bonbon the typographic equivalent of these exquisite chocolate sweets. Inspired by lettering on an Amsterdam church facade and a ladies clothing store window, Donald DBXL Beekman started drawing the first incarnation of Bon Bon already in 2004. The original idea was an alphabet design with slanted oval inner shapes and extremely long and striking serifs. This proved to be a quite demanding design job, so It took Bon Bon some time to get finished. But now it’s here in all its extravagant glory. Most recently a number of lowercase characters were added to make Bon Bon more versatile. Totally insane and over-top-the-top it has been called. But hey, we all love Bon Bon. Don't we?

In drawing the Avenir® typeface, Adrian Frutiger looked to both the past and the future for inspiration. His goal was to reinterpret the geometric sans serif designs of the early part of the 20th century in a typeface that would portend aesthetics of the 21st century. He succeeded handsomely. In doing so, Frutiger added a bit of organic humanism to the design, freeing Avenir from the rigid geometric overtones of the earlier designs. Avenir is employed on signage at Dallas Fort Worth and Hong Kong international airports. The city of Amsterdam adopted Avenir as its corporate typeface in 2003. The original Avenir family is made up of designs with gradual weight changes in order to satisfy the needs of specific text applications. While the book and light weights have similar stroke widths, the book weight is well suited for body text, whereas the light was designed for captions and subhead text. Featured in: Best Fonts for Resumes

Kade is a display/semi display sans family of fonts based on vernacular lettering photographed over the last ten years in and around the harbors of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Hence the name Kade that translates into English as ‘quay’, also the name of its designer. Kade grew slowly from many different ideas and elements. The letters reflects the industrial method in which they are cut for the side of ships from large steel plates. Frequently subtleties of curves are compromised due to the cutting tools and the fact engineers are in control. Kade’s italics have an experimental character and were produced in an unorthodox manner by rotating 8 degrees, rather than slanting the roman characters, a method sometimes employed in shipyards. Kade constructed character is ideal for contemporary editorial works, architecture magazines, museums communication and posters. The six distinct styles are published in OpenType format, featuring small caps and four sets of numbers (proportional old style, tabular old style, proportional lining and tabular lining), as well as matching currency symbols and a complete set of fractions.

In the late 1930s, old Egyptiennes (or Italiennes) returned to the collective consciousness of European printers and type houses — perhaps because political news were front a centre, especially in France where Le Figaro newspaper was seeing record circulation numbers. In 1939 both Monotype and Lettergieterij Amsterdam thought of the same idea: Make a new typeface similar to the reverse stress slab shapes that make up the titles of newspapers like Le Figaro and Le Frondeur. Both foundries intended to call their new type Figaro. Monotype finished theirs first, so they ended up with the name, and their type was already published when Stefan Schlesinger finished his take for the Amsterdam foundry. Schlesinger’s type was renamed Hidalgo (Spanish for a lower nobleman, ‘son of something’) and published in 1940 as ‘a very happy variation on an old motif’. Although it wasn’t a commercial success at the time, it was well received and considered subtler and more refined than the similar types available, Figaro and Playbill. In the Second World War, the Germans banned the use of the type, and Hidalgo never really recovered. Upon closer inspection, Schlesinger’s work on Hidalgo was much more Euro-sophisticated and ahead of its time than the too-wooden cut of Figaro and the thick tightness of Playbill. It has a modern high contrast, a squarer skeleton, contour cuts that work similarly outside and inside, and airy and minimal solutions to the more complicated shapes like G, K, M, N, Q and W. It is also much more aware of, and more accommodating to, the picket-fence effect the thick top slabs create in setting. Basilio (named after the signing teacher in Mozart’s Figaro) is the digital revival and major expansion of Hidalgo. With nearly 600 glyphs, it boasts Pan-European language support (most Latin languages, as well as Cyrillic and Greek), and a few OpenType tricks that gel it all together to make a very useful design tool. Stefan Schlesigner was born in Vienna in 1896. He moved to the Netherlands in 1925, where he worked for Van Houten’s chocolate, Metz department store, printing firm Trio and many other clients. He died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944. Digital revivals and expansions of two of his other designs, Minuet and Serena, have also been published by Canada Type.