Sign and Display JNL is a long-overdue companion font to 2009’s Sign and Poster JNL. The original design models were Art Deco influenced die-cut cardboard letters and numbers manufactured by the Duro Decal Company of Chicago. Square in shape with rounded corners, the thick cardboard letters were used for making show-cards and other display signage. Subsequently, Duro used the same style of lettering to manufacture water-applied decals for boat identification and other uses. It was a set of these decals (with a black outline and yellow interior) that inspired the outline typeface Sign and Display JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Oswald Bruce Cooper designed Cooper Black, an extra bold roman face, based on the forms of his earlier typeface Cooper Old Style, which appeared with Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Founders in Chicago. Copper Black was produced by Barnhart in 1922 and acquired in 1924 by the Schriftguß AG in Dresden, where it was later completed with a matching italic. Although Cooper Black appeared in the first third of the 20th century, it still looks contemporary and it can be found on storefronts in almost any city scene. The flowing outer contours create forms that are both strong and soft, making Cooper Black an extremely flexible font.

Based on the type style used for the Superior Sign and Chart Printer No. 929, this simple and clean sans serif font was perfectly suited for use by teachers in the classroom and for businesses and organizations that needed to make signs, price cards, charts and notices. Digitally redrawn as Schoolroom JNL, it is available in both regular and oblique versions. The Superior Marking Equipment Company [formerly of Chicago] was not only a major supplier of materials for the rubber stamp industry, but for most of its existence manufactured date and numbering stamps, sign and chart printers (such as the one used for this font), and a line of children’s printing toys (amongst other items).

It is 1984 and Ridley Scott’s commercial for Apple tells us, “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.” The first Mac comes on the market. The Mac interface includes a font for use in small sizes called Chicago. The first version was designed by Susan Kare. The font’s modern grid-like character was also used for the first iPod screens, which is why this font is also associated with music. Today’s font upgrade, Little Micro Sans, is suited for small-point texts, product labels, lists of ingredients, and small captions in books, magazines, websites or applications. For online use, a variable format is particularly handy as it offers all font styles in a single file, has a faster display time and takes up less memory. Little Micro Sans is a revolution for small sizes. Specimen: http://carontwice.com/files/specimen_Little_Micro_Sans.pdf

NixonScript is a display typeface inspired by the typographic emancipation given voice by 1950s and '60s north American vernacular type. NixonScript's starting point was lettering found on a 1960s camera found in a Chicago junk shop, but its development saw it transformed from a punchy sans-serif to a more thoughtful serif, with a lowered x-height and a vibe of almost priestly piousness. Rather than a simple regular italic, a bold italic is offered. During its development, the regular version seemed almost placid but with the double emphasis of bold and italic, NixonScript gained an energetic, self-congratulatory form.

Bylum is put together with a bulbous line segment that makes up the bulk of the font. The verticals bulge out in the middle, the curves vary in width along their lengths. This gives the font a relaxed sway to it even while its verticals are upright and its design is fairly regimented.

Antique Price Tags JNL is a collection of fifty-two decorative price cards recreating the look and charm of turn-of-the-last-century mercantile shops. The design is a hybrid of the decorative frame and dollar sign of antique price cards spotted in an online auction, and prices modeled from some gummed numerals once made by the Tablet and Ticket Company of Chicago under the brand name “Willson’s Gummed Letters” (after the company’s founder). Also included in the font are blank price cards with only a dollar sign, a cents sign or an empty frame, as well as a solid black frame for creating a backfill color. A companion font is available with the numbers in white on black panel backgrounds.

In the early 1960s, the Duro Decal Company of Chicago, Illinois added to its line of water-applied decal lettering a retail sign cabinet of die-cut, pressure sensitive vinyl letters and numbers. Four of the six sizes offered for sale were cut from white plastic with a black outline and a secondary gold inline for a tri-color effect. Sign Stickers JNL emulates as closely as possible the look of these nostalgic pieces, complete with the slight shifts in line weight due to hand-cut silk screens and the printing process. For those of you who prefer to make your own multi-colored letters, a three piece fill font set is available for the low price of a single font purchase. Combine the backfill, midfill and frontfill layers for a truly retro look!

Bitstream Cooper was designed at Bitstream in 1986 by means of adding light, medium, and bold styles, with the corresponding italics, to the existing black ones. Based on Cooper Black, 1919, by Oswald Bruce Cooper, which was firstly released as a hand composition font in 1922 by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler of Chicago and later spread by ATF. Cooper Black is an extra bold face based on Cooper Old Style. Bitstream Cooper is an old style face with rounded serifs and tilted back ovals. For use both in text (normal weights) and in advertising and display typography (heavy weights). Cyrillic version was developed for ParaType in 2000 by Manvel Shmavonyan and based on TM Oswald face of TypeMarket, 1996, by Victoria Grigorenko.

Kansas Casual offers a more upright, gothic, and modern alternative to the conventional sign painter's one stroke. Kansas provides a completely unique take on a overdone classic with proportions and crossbar heights inspired by the more friendly Chicago style. This all-caps set provides six weights so that you can adjust size with weight to maintain that authentic single brush weighted look. The proofing process included projecting, tracing, and then painting the letters out to see how true the small details were to the medium. The set also includes wide language support, opentype fractions, and arrows. You can learn more about its development here.

The San Jose type family provides an array of variants representing a simplified, bay area slant on traditional Chicano American street scripts. The styles in this set can be used in all caps for the most authentic appearance or in a more typographically traditional small caps format. This set also includes latin supplement support and a robust character set in six styles. 3 Stroke variants: Regular, Rough & Bold each have a leaned back, traditional slant variant.

Zayna is an uppercase sans serif font. The font works perfectly for headlines, posters, pull quotes, wordmark logos and many more. It includes full set of uppercase basic characters, multilingual symbols, numerals, punctuation (check the previews in order to see them all). Latin-based Language Support (You can check your language typing characters in text box below). 2 styles: plain, oblique. Happy creating!

Birdman is a modern blackletter font that merges rebellion and chicano style, elevating them to a new dimension of minimalism and edginess. With its trendy and condensed design, this geometric typeface captivates instantly. Its versatility makes it the perfect companion for impactful headlines, high-flying logos, and groundbreaking advertisements. Birdman challenges typographic conventions with its boldness, attracting all eyes with its simple elegance. With Birdman by your side, words take flight, releasing their rebellious and contemporary essence. Each stroke is a cry of originality, and each letter tells a tale of modernity and authenticity. Feel how this font elevates your designs, soaring toward new typographic horizons.

Mimeograph Lettering JNL is based on one of the numerous plastic lettering templates once manufactured by the A.B. Dick Company of Chicago and is available in both regular and oblique versions. The mimeograph utilized a porous drum which inked the backside of a waxed stencil sheet. Unlike traditional stencils which have cut out areas that are directly inked or painted, a mimeo stencil has the area to be printed scratched away by removing the wax coating with a stylus. The resulting image allows the ink from the drum to seep through the sheet and transfer to the blank paper. As with a companion font (Mimeograph Template JNL), the character shapes follow the routed letters of the template, complete with rounded terminals. A previous font release [designed with flat terminals and some alternate characters] is available as Interoffice Memo JNL.

@andinistas presents Rapsodia, an uncommon roman caps font with serif and high contrast, designed by #carlosfabiancg. Rapsodia was inspired by Stunt Roman, Speedball Textbook for Pen & Brush Lettering by Ross F. George. Rapsodia has a high and sweetened amount of contrast between thin and thick with drop-shaped finishes, reminiscent of Didot, Baskerville and Bodoni. Its artistic accent translates into Tuscan letters drawn with a flexible tip pen. In that order, Rapsodia combines the visual theatricality of an art nouveau corset, with creative historical classics such as Liza Minnelli, Gene Simmons and Freddie Mercury. Its calligraphic curlers full of Mannerist virtuosity are unnatural in Roman caps typefaces with serif. That is why its internal vein in ascending and descending flourishes protrudes with Chicano circus details like triangular diamonds located in vertical strokes. Rapsodia serves to design words and phrases in fine publications, for this reason most of its upper and lower case letters communicate feelings with classic and luxurious sensation through substitutes, ligatures and alternatives for beginning, middle or end of word, functioning as initials and terminals.

Ronde Script (Ronde meaning "A kind of script in which the heavy strokes are nearly upright, giving the characters when taken together a round look.") is based on the original design named Parisian Ronde released in 1878 by the Chappelle Foundry in Paris. Other versions of this script include Inland French Script, French Script, French Plate, and Typo Upright. Different type foundries tied to the releases of this design include Mayeur (Paris), Stephenson Blake (London), Bernhardt Brothers & Spindler (Chicago), and ATF (Elizabeth, NJ). This style of script has been a very popular choice in designing wedding invitations and so many other formal announcements for over 130 years. Its very readable, formal and elegant with an antique or retro feel.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Alexander Branczyk and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Branczyk and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! The three fonts in the F2F Czykago family, F2F Czykago Light, F2F Czykago Semi Serif, and F2F Czykago Trans, were all inspired by the Apple system font Chicago. The F2F Czykago family, along with 38 other Face2Face fonts, is included in the TakeType 5 collection from Linotype. Branczyk designed 16 of these himself."

Monospaced fonts can be so dull...they are often only suitable for something like programming and other places where you need the text lined up perfectly. Well, that is not the case with Organic Thinker! Yes, it is monospaced, but it is also handmade and full of vibrant and organic life! Each letter has 5 slightly different versions, and they automatically changes as you type - makes you forget everything about programming, kerning and other dull things! :) Well...you are more than welcome to use Organic Thinker for your next Turbo Pascal text, actually I'd fancy that! :)

Before ink jet and laser printers; before copy machines, the main way to make multiples of anything not provided by printing press was by a mimeograph machine or spirit duplicator. The mimeograph utilized a porous drum which inked the backside of a waxed stencil sheet. Unlike traditional stencils which have cut out areas that are directly inked or painted, a mimeo stencil has the area to be printed scratched away by removing the wax coating with a stylus. The resulting image allows the ink from the drum to seep through the sheet and transfer to the blank paper. Based on a plastic lettering guide once manufactured by the A.B. Dick Company of Chicago, Mimeograph Template JNL is available in regular and oblique versions. Albert Blake Dick, the company’s founder, coined the term ‘mimeography’. The font’s character shapes follow the routed letters of the template, complete with rounded terminals. An earlier font release [designed with flat terminals and some alternate characters] is available as Interoffice Memo JNL.

Aeda Rift is a high-contrast display typeface characterized by its sharp serifs and graceful contours, mirroring the elegance and hostility of the desert landscape. Consisting of nearly 400 glyphs, this font includes a full upper and lower case Latin-based alphabet, punctuation, symbols, diacritics, and ligatures—all together supporting over 82 languages. Perfect for headlines, pull quotes, and intro decks, Aeda Rift is carefully kerned and primed for creativity.

The BrightIdeas family contains two novelty fonts that have letters on light bulbs. The fonts have some characters on standing bulbs and some on hanging bulbs and these two sets are made to alternate with the OpenType contextual alternatives (calt) feature. To use only one set of bulbs, this feature must be turned off and character spacing adjusted. The family contains a style with clear bulbs and one with filled bulbs. They can be used in layers to add color. Both are monospaced. The characters on the bulbs are derived from the font Myhota-Bold.

The Superior Marking Equipment Company was originally located in Chicago, Illinois and over the years produced a line of both commercial and toy rubber stamp printing sets which were used for making signs, posters, tickets and other printed items. Rough Print JNL reproduces the scanned images printed from one of the toy rubber stamp sets. The sample characters were smaller than one half inch in height and were further reduced during scanning. This gives the end result of a typeface which looks like rubber stamp imprints at small sizes, and very angular, distorted, somewhat grunge type when printed at larger sizes. There is a limited character set consisting of alphabet, numerals, some punctuation and currency symbols. No kerning was added to keep the hand-made appeal. Rough Print JNL is an all caps font with the letters and numbers jogged randomly on both the caps and lower case keystrokes. For a similar design with lower case, Amateur Printer JNL is recommended.

NO! I don’t have a bearskin rug, nor a fur collar on my jacket. I believe fur should only be worn by its first owner. I have no idea why I called this font Bearskin: maybe I was influenced by one of the Viking novels I am reading - they’re full of Berserkers - but that name was already taken. Anyhoo, Bearskin font is a nice handmade all caps font. A little rough here and there, but with a lot of character as well. Bearskin comes with swashes, so you can have a ball!

In Dutch, a Mandarijn is a Tangerine. I found out that it is called a Mandarin in Australia as well! I really like Mandarins, so I thought I’d give them their well-deserved place in the spotlights by naming a font after them. The whispers part - well, that’s just because it sounded good. Mandarin Whispers is a very nice brush font, which was actually not made with a brush, but with a cheapie marker pen. It comes with all the bells & whistles, so have a ball!

Belhampton is a lively display family, full of the spirit of the Edwardian era. Six typefaces are offered: regular, bold, light, oblique, embossed and outline. All include an extensive range of stylistic alternates and discretionary ligatures, as well as lining and old-style numerals. Belhampton is ideal for poster and display work, or just the thing for any piece of Belle Epoque design.

A disc jockey-only promotional sleeve for a 1964 [45 rpm] release of “Close to Me” and “Let Them Talk” by Dan Penn featured the song titles printed in a stencil typeface on the record sleeve. Closely resembling a stencil version of Franklin Gothic but with its own unique characteristics, this design has been reinterpreted as Turntable Stencil JNL and is available in both regular and oblique versions. For trivia buffs, Dan Penn is a singer-songwriter-record producer, often collaborating with Dewey Lindon “Spooner” Oldham; both closely associated with the late Rick Hall’s Fame recording studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In 1964, Hall started the Fame record label, and for a time it was distributed by Vee-Jay Records of Chicago, the first major Black-owned record label in the United States. Penn’s release was only the second for the new label; Fame 6402.

George Ryan's ITC Migrate is a highly condensed sans serif display face that effectively complements ITC Adderville. Migrate represents what Ryan calls a “more highly evolved version” of a typeface he designed for Bitstream in 1991 called Oz Handicraft. “Both faces,“ says Ryan, “are based on designs of the popular early 20th-century type designer Oswald Cooper.” His inspiration came from drawing samples found in the Book of Oz Cooper, published in 1949 by the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago. “Oz worked extensively with the sans serif form long before it became popular in the States, eschewing a popular belief of the time that sans serifs were only skeletons of letters.” Where Oz Handicraft was informal and quirky, ITC Migrate has a more restrained feel. “The uppercase characters and figures, in particular, have been reworked,” says Ryan, ”resulting in a more formal and traditional, compressed sans serif typeface.”

FattyPans is a strange, bizarre font with spiky serifs that bulges where letters are not supposed to bulge.

Health Warning! Coconuts are not that healthy!! I always thought that coconuts were the new quinoa, but apparently they’re not that good for you. They are furry balls of saturated fat, sugar and calories, so don’t go all out with your coconut eating habits! Of course, eating a bit of coconut now and then will not kill you, so enjoy! Coconut Punch is a handmade didone-ish font. Nice and rounded and full of saturated brush strokes. Comes with all the diacritics you need too!

HWT Aetna is a revival of the sturdy Roman style of wood type most often called simply Aetna. This new digital version by Aaron Bell features four widths all based on the various widths commonly offered by 19th Century wood type manufacturers. In addition, there is a four-layer all-caps version Aetna based on the the famous Wm. Page Chromatic Types, that allows the user the ability to easily create these chromatic streamer and shadow effects. Both the multiple width Aetnas and Streamer component fonts support full Western and Eastern European languages.

A full fisted font!

DecorateTheTree is a festive novelty font family containing two styles designed to be used in layers. Each style has letters on Christmas-tree lights. The regular style has clear bulbs and the bold style has filled bulbs. Some characters are on standing bulbs and others on hanging bulbs and these two sets are made to alternate with the OpenType contextual alternatives (calt) feature. To use only one set of bulbs, this feature must be turned off and character spacing adjusted, though why anyone would want to use only one set is a mystery. These fonts are monospaced. They are useful to display a holiday message not just in words but in the lettering itself. (The characters on the bulbs are derived from the font SansduskiMono.)

Super Hand is a handwriting font. It includes the full West European diacritics and a full set of ligatures, making it suitable for multilingual environments and publications.

Ecliptica is an extended family of five very condensed typefaces in a single bold weight. The creation of Australian designer Robert Bell. Ecliptica has a Sans, a Semi-Serif, a Serif and a single Cursive that can be used with any of the other three styles. As an added bonus, Robert also designed a modern Blackletter companion. The Ecliptica family is an unusual layout of styles and all work equally well with one another. The OpenType versions of the Ecliptica fonts support an extended Latin character set that includes a full array of fractions as well as additional ligatures. The Sans and Cursive fonts contain some cap and lowercase alternates.

Quirkies is a dingbat font full of whimsical illustrations.

Star Cursive is a connected letter script which is full of stars! Float with the stars, drifting through the galaxy! Use this star font whenever sparkle, glamour or a touch of the stars is needed. Star Cursive is extended, containing the full West European diacritics and a full set of ligatures, making it suitable for multilingual environments and publications.

Sequel Rounded is a post-Max Bill font, developed in close cooperation with the Max Bill Georges Vantongerloo foundation in Switzerland. MAX BILL Last universal scholar, most important design teacher of the 20th century: There are superlatives, always very enthusiastic, when the importance of Max Bill is discussed. The trained silversmith studied at the Bauhaus, with personalities such as Josef Albers, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer. He worked as an architect, later as sculptor and designer.

Funky Mother is a curly, yet legible font. Full romantic curves!

Standard Cap is rough font made to look like it was written with a "standard cap" (the cap that comes on a krylon, rusto or other spraycan). The font includes full uppercase and lowercase alphabets as well as a full array of numbers, symbols, punctuation etc.

Check out Mr Gabe in motion! Mr Gabe is a typeface designed to dance. Not that it’s a flamboyant display face, but that it has a liveliness, especially in its heavier weights, that dances across the page. And the letters include a selection of exuberant flourishes that can be used to kick up a ruckus or make a sweeping gesture. Mr Gabe is a high-contrast serif typeface with vertical stress, a “modern” face in traditional type terms. Even in the regular weight, the contrast between thick and thin strokes is very obvious. Designer Andrea Leksen has given many of the lowercase letters ball terminals, teardrop shapes that make Mr Gabe seem decorated even when most of its letter forms are conservative. If you need more bells and whistles, or perhaps revolving mirror balls and dancing shoes, you can explore the font’s collection of ornaments and decorative borders. Mr Gabe comes in four weights, from Regular to Black, with italics for each. Each font includes over 57 ligatures, 31 illustrations and borders, small caps and proportional oldstyle numerals.