This roly-poly romp through the alphabets is based on a showing from Carl Holmes' 1950s book, ABC of Lettering, published by art-for-the-masses magnate Walter T. Foster. Named as an apt companion to my East Coast Frolics.

Another gem from Carl Holmes’ ABC of Lettering artbook, this unusual headline font is both elegant and edgy. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Gamon is an innovative and daring unicase display font that is a perfect example of modern typography. The absence of traditional lowercase letters and the integration of multiple glyphs in the uppercase letters create a distinct and captivating design. The uniform size of the letters adds to the font’s appealing appearance, making it an ideal choice for large display layouts, branding, posters, and titles. Gamon’s typography is perfect for designers who are looking for a fresh and unusual aesthetic. It can transform any digital or print design stand out from the rest. Gamon’s versatility makes it suitable for a broad range of design applications, including logos, packaging, and marketing materials. Gamon’s boldness and uniqueness make it an excellent choice for designers who want to break free from the conventional design constraints. With Gamon, designers can create designs that are not only visually appealing but also memorable and impactful.

Between twilight and daybreak it is said that the dark side of the human psyche eclipses the sun that shines from the depths of our souls. Certainty turns to doubt, clarity becomes confusion, man turns into wolf, the dead wake, vampires seduce the young are restless and milk boils over on the stove. Those that seek only to bathe in the light of a romantic new moon often end their tragic lives soaked in nothing other than their own blood, and the milk spilt on the stovetop has no one left to cry over it. There are fifty shades of grey during those hours after sunset and I think just as many in my porridge this morning. Yes, okay, I admit it, I spoiled the milk! This porridge tastes like it was left in a graveyard overnight. Death warmed over. Gothic and lumpy. Just like the Buried weights of this font.

This font is mainly inspired from the engraved characters of a German Map depicting Germany's roads and parts of surrounding lands, edited in Berlin probably in the end of 1700's. The engraver was Carl Jaeck or Jaek (1763-1808). The Map was bought by the French napoleonic general Louis Pierre Delosme (1768-1828) probably during the Napolenic campaign against Germany, circa 1805 or at least 1806, his sole staying in Germany. The font (with two styles, Normal and Italic)is containing standard ligatures and a few alternative characters. It is a "small eye" or "Small x-eight" font, as the Maps' characters are most often very small (some Italic lower cases of the map are 1mm hight, upper cases 2mm) The standard English characters set is completed with accented or specific characters for Western (Including Celtic) and Central European, Baltic, Eastern Europe and Turkish languages.

The techno sound of the 1990s, a personal computer, font creation software, and some inspiration all came together to inspire the F2F (Face2Face) font series. Alessio Leonardi and his friends had the demand to create new unusual typefaces, which would be used in the leading German techno magazine of the day, Frontpage. Even typeset as small as 6-points, in nearly undecipherable layouts, it was a pleasure for the kids to read and try to decrypt the messages. F2F Madame Butterfly is a font with a heavy, or dark, appearance. The darkness is brought about by the overlapping bits of glyph forms that make up each letter in the typeface.

Garagin Rock was developed from the studies for the title of a publication called Garagin in 1999. Its use is indicated for the titles on posters and stuff like that, but feel free to dare. Anyway, it really was not made ​​for small sizes and is not a WebFont obviously, but again, feel free to dare. May you notice something odd in the baseline position, this is to keep leading with a defined size. But of course you can change it in any editing program. Being a heavy typeface, use in moderation... or not! Garagin Rock Lite is a version with a limited set of characters.

Introducing Fire Hell – a fiery font inspired by the intensity of death metal. With flames dancing within each letter, this font is tailor-made for death metal, black metal, gothic, horror, and other heavy music genres. The sharp, angular design adds a touch of darkness, making it the perfect visual companion for bands seeking a fierce and impactful typographic identity. Unleash the power of Fire Hell to set your artwork ablaze and embody the relentless spirit of heavy music. Ignite the darkness with this visually striking font! Fire Hell features: Allcaps Beginning Uppercase alternate Ending Uppercase alternate Numbers and punctuation PUA Encoded Characters OpenType Features

Introducing "Abyssal Gothic Textura," a hauntingly elegant blackletter font that reimagines medieval dark-fantasy with a modern twist. This font captures the allure of ancient calligraphy while preserving its historical aura. Meticulously crafted, each character exudes gothic grandeur, appealing to both traditionalists and forward-thinking designers. Ideal for sophisticated projects, it lends enigmatic allure to book covers, posters, and invitations. With support for multiple languages and stylistic alternates, "Abyssal Gothic Textura" empowers creativity in diverse designs. Let it guide you into the dark-fantasy realm, where it unveils hidden depths, bridging ancient charm and contemporary allure. Embrace the enigma of history with this captivating typographic gem.

Thunder Inferno is a gothic black metal typeface with sharp serifs. Rooted in the aesthetics of heavy metal and the occult, this typeface is a harbinger of darkness and intensity. Evocative of Halloween and gothic grandeur, Thunder Inferno also captures a march toward darkness. It serves as a rebellious voice for skate culture and alternative lifestyles. Crafted exclusively in uppercase, this font is a growl in typographic form, a visual cacophony that grabs your attention and refuses to let go. Capitalize the first and last letters of any word for symmetrical heavy metal style. Example: Heavy metaL Enclose any word in < > ( ) [ ] { } to give it wings. Example: [HawkstylE]

Rogelio Script is a stylish modern calligraphy font with casual chic flair. It is perfect for branding, wedding invites and cards, signature and maybe for red wine label. Rogelio Script includes full set of gorgeous uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, a large range of punctuation and variation ligatures. All lowercase letters include beginning and ending swashes, giving realistic hand-lettered style. What you get, darling? In order to use the beautiful swashes, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Indesign and Corel Draw.

Southland Script Handwritten Font with contemporary, sophisticated accents. It is perfect for branding, wedding invites, tagline, cards, maybe for label and logo. Southland includes full set of gorgeous uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, a large range of punctuation and ligatures. It expresses beauty of handwriting. What you get, darling? In order to use the beautiful ligatures, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Indesign and Corel Draw. Feel free to give me a message if you have a problem or question.

Sagrantino™ shines at large sizes – and in vibrant colors. Think big posters, commanding headlines, massive banners and oversized packaging. Set headlines in the Highlight or Shadow designs and running copy in the Regular – all on the same page! Sagrantino could be called the Lava Lamp of fonts. It’s slick, glossy, retro and futuristic. Somehow, it’s fresh and quirky-classic at the same time. This is a design that challenges you to think outside the text box. In fact, Sagrantino is so lively, it took three Monotype typeface designers, Karl Leuthold, Juan Villanueva and Carl Crossgrove, to draw it. Because it’s a script, Sagrantino pairs perfectly with just about any other design – except another script. Maintain the futuristic retro vibe by combining Sagrantino with a typeface like Biome™ or Neo™ Tech. Looking for a counterpoint? Try a cool sans like Avenir® Next or Univers® Next. OpenType® Pro fonts of Sagrantino enable automatic insertions from a crowd of fancy ligatures and delightful alternate characters – in addition to offering an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.

Bolda Display is a a-z lowercase display font in two styles; regular and outline. Lowercase is regular and uppercase is outline. Inspired by the 1970’s tennis, dart and ping pong fashion. Perfect for headlines, logos and everything above the body.

The design of Candle Wax JNL comes from an original movie poster for the movie "Bell, Book and Candle" starring James Stewart. The oddly erratic letter forms conjure up ideas of spells, witchcraft and other things found lurking on dark moonlit nights.

A 1925 edition for an orchestral arrangements catalog entitled “Carl Fischer Progressive Orchestra Edition” has the title hand lettered in a bold, stylized Roman type design. This has now become the digital font Fancy Roman JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

March Anchor is a organic blackletter with handdrawn feel. This typefaces is perfect for people looking for vintage aesthetic and dark feel. Suitable for any graphic designs such as branding materials, t-shirt, print, logo, poster, t-shirt, quotes .etc Regards, Ironbird Creative

Kunze font was inspired by the work of German graphic artist Carl Kunze (Minden, 1884). Kunze is a fat display font; a little rough around the edges, a little wonky in places, but very distinguishable and useful. Comes with extensive language support.

KubaApplique is a bold and exciting African font that makes use of the interplay of black and white shapes -- reminiscent of the Kuba cloths that are made and used by the Bakuba tribe. Typified by a balance between dark and light areas, the characters reflect the ethos of Africa. Kuba applique contains the full range of upper and lower case characters, all punctuation and special characters as well as the accented characters used in the major European languages. Because the way in which the individual letters fit together is so important in Kuba Applique, I took especial care of the kerning and spacing of characters. The font is intended to be used as a display font.

The English typographer Robert Harling created Tea Chest in 1939 with the Stephenson Blake foundry. Today, this classic design is available in digital format from Linotype GmbH. Tea Chest is a bold stencil face. The font's narrow letters are all caps, and they sport small, slab serifs. Harling's design was most likely reminiscent of the old industrial lettering painted onto boxes and wooden crates that used to be shipped all over the world on the high seas. These letters had to be simple to reproduce, easy to read, and not take up too much space! Try out Tea Chest for large signage displays, on exotic product packaging, or in magazine or newsletter headlines.

Alternate Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Typefounders Company in 1903. All three weights of Alternate Gothic are bold and narrow. In fact, this face is essentially a condensed version of Benton’s other well-known sans serif types, Franklin Gothic and News Gothic. In the early twentieth century, the modern concept of type “families” had not yet been formed — and though Benton designed these sans serifs to harmonize with each other, the foundry gave them different names. Robust, dark, and coolly competent, Alternate Gothic is a good choice when strong typographic statements must fit into tight spaces. As a modern usage, it is currently the font of YouTube’s homepage logo.

We all love a good burger here at Vette Letters. We also love to prepare them ourselves. Grilling the patties, cutting the tomatoes and cucumber, nothing beats a home made hamburger. And the best and tastiest way to grill a burger is on a wood charcoal grill. So all in all we can safely say that burgers and wood are a pretty darn good combination. This made Donald Roos decide to design VLNL Woodburger, obviously based on 19th century American wood type alphabets. Donald decided to add cyrillic characters, as he strongly believed that Russians would be equally partial to home made burgers. VLNL Woodburger is not really polished font, it will give any design a rough sturdy edge.

Broken letters or Gothic letters, also known as German letters, are the typeface used in Europe West from the 12th century to the 17th century. Meanwhile, Danish spoke it until 1875 and German, Estonian and Latvian spoke it well into the 20th century. Fracture is one of the broken typefaces that is often considered to represent the entire broken typeface. Broken letters are sometimes also called Old English, but not in the Old English or Anglo-Saxon sense that was born centuries earlier. This group of letters is so named because it contains Latin letters that have breaks in the curvature of the letters, either in part or in whole designs. The fracture arises from a sudden dip when writing certain parts of the letter. In contrast, letters with perfect, unbroken curves, such as Antikua, are created from smooth, flowing writing movements. Callimathy is a font inspired by the Blackletter typeface, made with a modern impression but still looks strong and unique. In addition, Young Best font is also supported with multilingual characters that can be used in several international languages. Callimathy font is very suitable for use in making music album cover designs, tattoo logos, wishkey labels, packaging pomades and so on which are made with dark and strong concepts.

P22 Late November is a transitional Antiqua-inspired type design great for text and display uses. The name is derived from the dark, November night in which the design of the font began. The Pro version features fractions, ligatures and full Central European support.

Inspired by Karl-Heinz Lange’s Publica, Bravura Pro is a versatile humanist sans font family with a slight calligraphic touch which makes it ideal for private correspondence as well as for body texts in magazines and books. All styles contain small caps and oldstyle figures.

This simple, charming script is based on the handlettering of Carl Holmes, from Walter T. Foster art book entitled ABC of Lettering. Elementary! Both versions of this font include the complete Latin 1252 and CE 1250 character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

The origin of Grimm was to create a typeface in the spirit of Elliott Peter Earls' Subluxation, but somewhere in the process things shifted to a blackletter influenced uppercase while the lowercase became more roman. The end result is a quirky little blackletter display typeface.

Modusa is a very fancy display font. Expertly designed to be a true favorite, this font has the potential to take your every creative idea to the highest level! Based on the Lunda typeface first created by Karl Erik Forsberg, in 1941. thank you

Morgothick is an ugly not-so-decorative blackletter font, hand-drawn like straight from the dark Middle Ages of drunk monks and dim chambers. Most readable, suits for multiple purposes. Morgothick supports West and Central European languages as well as Baltic, Turkish and Romanian.

Aniara is a playful, happy and intergalactic font. Arriving in three different weights, Light, Regular and Bold. + the antagonist; the dark version without the space/counter. Aniara comes with laser shrinked upper case letters. It attacks with a alternative upper and lower case glyph. PoFF!!

Devil Candle Variable is a dark variable typeface. Ideal for the bone-chilling narratives of horror movies, this typeface encompasses the raw essence of Halloween and satanic lore, effectively encapsulating the pulse of terror that courses through the veins of the enchanted and the damned.

Trapped home during the Coronavirus outburst of March 2020 the Zetafonts team found some solace from the world-wide anxiety by designing letters for the #36daysoftype challenge. To fight dark thoughts and spread some good karma we decided to add a free font twist, selecting the best glyphs drawn to develop a collection of ten free typefaces for download. We did our best to make this little gift to the community valuable, though developed in record time: although playful and excessive, these typefaces all stem from our current research in contemporary trends and historical design solutions, bridging calligraphy and design. The typefaces have been published daily starting Monday, March 30. You can download and use the typefaces in any way you desire, as they are totally free for commercial and non-commercial use. We are not asking anything back, but feel free to share the good karma and, if you want, please consider a donation for hospitals.

Started during 2012, LCT Palissade is a letter type belonging to the Didone classification. It takes over the Italian characters from the XVII century. Century affected by a huge artistic and industrial mutation, we assist to the eruption of the railroad network and Turner’s paintings. In typography, the Didones(XVIIe) begins to concede the place to the Egyptians XIXe. We noticed an evolution to rectangular drawings, that were heavier and darker. LCT Palissade is in fact the study of a history flow, crossing through the industrial revolution and romanticism; the result of a strong letter type, solid, strict the drawing is orientated towards very dark, reminiscent of the characters beginning XIXe. The serifs are the summary between the British characters from the end of (XVIe) and the Italian ones beginning of (XVIIe). In order to spread out the romanticism, they are very fine to allow a largest contrast and keep the elegance of the global shape.

This typeface is based on lettering by Carl Marx (1911?1991), designed during his first semester at the Bauhaus in Joost Schmidt?s class, in 1932. Although the letter proportions are based on Schmidt?s teachings, the forms are not constructed from compass and ruler, but drawn with brush and marker, lending the words a warm and lively touch. Hidetaka Yamasaki redrew the letters from scratch and added all missing characters for today?s needs. A set of hanging figures, alternates for some critical letterforms (such as f, r, and t) as well as several ligatures make CarlMarx especially suitable for use in body text. As suggested by Marx, Yamasaki captured two weights from the original drawing and perfectly adjusted light and bold to highlight words and create hierarchy in headlines ? without losing or adding space. True to the original, Yamasaki captured the wobbly contour in CarlMarx, preserving warmth in the condensed geometric style of the early 1930s.

Ponderosa font is a joint work of the typeface designers K.B. Chansler, C. Crossgrove and C. Twombly, who also created Rosewood, Zebrawood and Pepperwood together. As the name suggests, it is so-called wood type. The origins of this kind of typeface can be found in the early 19th century. Called Italian or Italienne, these typefaces quickly became very popular. They are distinguished by square serifs whose width is larger than the stroke width of the characters. When the letters are set together, the heavy serifs build dark horizontal bands. The distinguishing characteristic of Ponderosa lies in its extremely fine figures between heavy serifs. The designers approached the boundaries of the impossible with this contrast. The typeface is reminiscent of the Wild West with its shootouts and heroes as well as of the 1970s with their platform shoes and wild hair-dos. When used carefully in headlines, Ponderosa font will surely attract attention.