Sometimes you get an idea stuck in your head and the only way to get rid of that demon is to put something down on paper. A year later the doodles became a skeleton, and then the skeleton had a body, then the body had a name, then the name got a personality. What was left was a clean set of ten fonts that encompass a very simple skeleton with a lot of visual appeal. During the process, I saw ways to expand the typeface’s display capabilities by producing inline styles as well as a down-and-dirty rough set. Each font has a full set of glyphs that include Central European and Small Cap characters.

Qi is a display sans-serif inspired, in part, by the art deco typefaces sometimes seen on old signs along rural American backroads. Unlike these signs, Qi is new, fresh, a little bit quirky, and not at all in need of repair or a fresh coat of paint. The family is comprised of six distinct fonts with more on the way. With an entire set of Central and Western European (and, of course, American) glyphs, plus a bunch of alternates and ligatures, Qi could be the perfect display face for your next sign, poster, newsletter, headline or, well, most anything else. Hey, the lowercase alone makes these fonts well worth the price.

Avid Pro font family is designed by Naghi Naghashian. A modern interpretation of classic Sans Serif characters in 6 weights: Thin, Light, Regular, Demi Bold, Bold and Heavy. The character set of this Font family supports most western languages including: Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Sami, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish. There are 17 additional symbol characters: euro, litre, estimated, omega, pi, partialdiff, delta, product, summation, radical, infinity, integral, approxequal, notequal, lessequal, greaterequal, and lozenge. It also includes the characters necessary to support the following central European languages: Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian and Turkish.

Sometimes you get an idea stuck in your head and the only way to get rid of that demon is to put something down on paper. A year later the doodles became a skeleton, and then the skeleton had a body, then the body had a name, then the name got a personality. What was left was a clean set of ten fonts that encompass a very simple skeleton with a lot of visual appeal. During the process, I saw ways to expand the typeface's display capabilities by producing inline styles as well as a down-and-dirty rough set. Each font has a full set of glyphs that include Central European and Small Cap characters.

Some time ago, I found myself in a clinic with my wife: at the time she was 20 weeks pregnant and had to do an ultrasound. To pass the time, I leafed through some (ladies') magazines which were lying around. Most of them tackled big issues like which shoes to wear and what type of foundation to plaster on, but one glossy featured a photo shoot. The photographer had found an old building with a beautiful art deco tile mural and had placed his skinny model in front of it. Fortunately for me, the mural featured a lot of text in a beautiful frilly style. I re-created the font I saw and it became "Jubileum" - which just means Jubilee in Dutch.

Corsa Grotesk is our very own tribute to two typographic giants: the Futura and Avenir typefaces. It is Designed with geometric simplicity in mind with well balanced strokes and modern touch. Generous proportions and x-height with more contemporary details - the single story ‘a’ and the horizontally barred ‘k’ being just two of many examples makes it shine in every jobs it takes. Corsa Grotesk blends the classic geometric aesthetics into a well-balanced font with generous proportions and minimal contrast. It features 10 weights ranging from Hairline to Black plus matching italics, as well as Cyrillic support for Bulgarian and Russian localizations. Filled with all the essential OpenType features like tabular figures, fractions, ligatures etc, it is a great choice for branding, advertising, user interfaces or any text that needs a bit of polish and a slick, present-day look that still feels familiar. With its 2.0 version we managed to polish the font even more. We revisited every path and fixed all the inaccuracies throughout. Corsa Grotesk now comes with way better and consistent spacing and kerning, just the right amount of contrast and balance. Live Tester | Download Demo Fonts | Subscribe

For years, the print ads for the Hickok Jewelry Company [renowned for their line of men's belts, suspenders, wallets, cufflinks, etc.] featured its name and related main line ad copy hand-lettered in a condensed monoline with Art Deco styling. This has been reproduced in Fashionable JNL, available in both regular and oblique versions. For those of you who are wondering: yes, the founder of the company was a distant relative of "Wild Bill" Hickok.

First published in 1938, Letters and Lettering by Paul Carlyle and Guy Loring was a textbook on lettering examples and how to do them. On one of the pages was found a solid black (counterless) Art Deco sans serif design that in its many variations so typified the era. The example shown in that book served as the model for Postmodern Moderne JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Metropole is an exercise in combing the curvaceous lines of the Art Nouveau with the solid character and simplicity of Art Deco. The resulting three display faces combine the spirit of the 20s and of the thirties, creating lively fun display faces for headings, signage and banners. These characterful faces with clear simple outlines are also ideal to lend a distinctive air to your web pages, or to create a distinctive 'house-style' for lettering.

In 1937, Morris Fuller Benton designed Empire, titling capitals that became the headline style for Vogue magazine. In 1989, David Berlow revived it for Publish magazine, adding an italic and a lowercase, both unavailable in the original. He revisited Empire in 1994 with Kelly Ehrgott Milligan, adding two heavier weights, small caps, and an elegant set of Art Deco–flavored oldstyle figures, ultimately expanding it to a seven-part series; FB 1989–94

The hand lettered title on the sheet music for "Gee, But I'd Like to Make You Happy" (from the 1930 MGM motion picture "Good News") presented a conundrum. Some of the lettering was a classic Art Deco "thick and thin" design while the others resembled comic book title lettering. Leaning toward the comic book style, the conflicting letters were revised and the finished result became Funny Business JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

Two pieces of vintage sheet music (“Honeymoon Hotel” and “By a Waterfall”) from Warner Brothers' 1933 musical “Footlight Parade” featured a hand-lettered bold alphabet with a touch of the 1930s Art Deco influence. These song sheets served as the basis for Pocomoke JNL. As informal and casual as the design is, its strength is in the boldness of the letter forms (which showcases the era of pen-and-ink display lettering).

A set of vintage lettering templates manufactured by Albert Nestler in Germany yielded this Art-Deco flavored typeface with many unusual letter forms. Lettering templates were used for decades by architects and draftsmen prior to other advanced lettering methods to label renderings, blueprints and layouts. Although they are similar to stencils in the fact that the lettering is traced, templates are designed to produce solid lettering with the use of a technical pen.

Hand lettered Art Deco lettering for the title on the cover of the 1930s-era song "And I Still Do" provided the inspiration for Swing Era JNL. A bold, casual and friendly typeface, it features an intersecting inline through some of the characters. One could almost picture the hottest big band of the day promoted on a lobby card with this alphabet, beckoning all to come on in and "cut a rug".

Graffix is best described as a modern classic. A crisp geometric sans serif with just a hint of Art Deco in the roll of the capital A, D & R, and the curvaceous lines of the capital M, V & W. The distinctive tear shaped counters of the lower case a, b, d, p & q give it its essential character, together with such quirky features as the angular descenders of the lower case g and j.

The unusual name for this Deco style typeface comes from the playful and pun-laden 1960s Rocky & Bullwinkle TV show. It is the name of the newspaper in the mythical town of Frostbite Falls, MN, home of the two cartoon stars. The name, Picayune Intelligence, literally means “pretty dumb”, but we don’t think that describes Nick’s competent design at all. It is comforting to know that someone is still watching quality television.

A 1930s WPA (Works Progress Administration) poster promoting national parks depicts Native Americans overlooking the land with the tag line "his hunting ground of yesterday". The hand lettering of that text is reminiscent of Futura Black and similar Art Deco stencil-influenced type designs, but is rendered in an oblique lower case with no capitals. Re-drawn as Sandwich Shop JNL, the typeface is now available in both regular (vertical) and oblique versions.

Dempster is a geometric sans serif design by Jim Ford. It is tall, bold and square with interesting details such as the angled terminals on the lowercase letters and friendly-looking punctuation. This typeface could feel at home with Art Deco and Modernism themes, as well as Sci-Fi and high-tech flavored graphics. Medium to large headline sizes work best when using Dempster. Dempster features include Extended Latin, Greek and Cyrillic support.

Secca Art recovers some of the expressive forms of early art nouveau and art deco grotesques — not copying it, but carefully adapting it for today. Secca Art is based on the Secca typeface family and is full interchangeable. Both are equal in weights, widths and word spacing, so you can decide to give your layout a more expressive or serious look. If you need Italic styles just use the Italics from Secca .

Belmont JNL is named for an avenue in the Bronx, New York famous for once being the location of the Belmont Estate, which was the home of the Lorrillard tobacco family. The Art-Deco-era hand lettering from some vintage sheet music is the basis for this type design. During the 1950s a quartet of teenaged Italian-American singers took the street's name for their vocal group, naming themselves Dion and the Belmonts.

The thin, stylish Art Deco slab serif lettering featured on the cover of the 1934 sheet music for “Then I’ll be Tired of You” inspired the digital type face Park West JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. Central Park West has always been the upscale area for affluent New Yorkers, but in the Great Depression years of the 1930s the mystique of the well-to-do held an even stronger significance.

Lagos was created because of the lack of African-inspired fonts that are truly modern without being partly art-deco in origin. I wanted to make a vigorous, sharp-edged font that reflects the energy and dynamism of modern Africa. The lines of the font combine the sharp angularity of African rocks and mountains with the smooth fluidity of Africa's snake-black rivers. The font is supplied in two styles, Lagos Regular and Lagos Light. Lagos Light is not a simple, mechanical modification of Lagos Regular. The outlines and proportions have been subtly modified to accommodate the lighter weight. Lagos contains a full 256 character set (upper and lower case, punctuation, diacritical characters, special symbols and numerals), in which all characters have been fully kerned and letter-spaced.

Geometric font inspired by shop signs in 4 styles Anisette has sprouted as a way to test some ideas of designs. It has started with a simple line construction (not outlines as usual) that can be easily expanded and condensed in its width in Illustrator. Subsequently, this principle of multiple widths and extreme weights permitted to Jean François Porchez to have a better understanding with the limitations associated with the use of MultipleMaster to create intermediate font weights. Anisette built around the idea of two widths capitals can be described as a geometric sanserif typeface influenced by the 30s and the Art Deco movement. Its design relies on multiple sources, from Banjo through Cassandre posters, but especially lettering of Paul Iribe. In France, at that time, the Art Deco spirit is mainly capitals. Gérard Blanchard has pointed to Jean Francois that Art Nouveau typefaces designed by Bellery-Desfontaines was featured before the Banjo with this principle of two widths capitals. The complementarity between the two typefaces are these wide capitals mixed with narrow capitals for the Anisette while the Anisette Petite – in its latest version proposes capitals on a square proportions, intermediate between the two others sets. Of course, the Anisette Petite fonts also includes lowercases too. Anisette Petite, a geometric font inspired by shop signs in 4 styles So, when Jean François Porchez has decided to create lowercases the story became more complicated. His stylistic references couldn’t be restricted anymore to the French Art-déco period but to the shop signs present in our cities throughout the twentieth century. These signs, lettering pieces aren’t the typical foundry typefaces. Simply because the influences of these painted letters are different, not directly connected to foundry roots which generally follow typography history. The outcome is a palette of slightly strange shapes, without strictly not following geometrical, mechanical and historical principles such as those that typically appear in typefaces marketed by foundries. As an example, the Anisette Petite r starts with a small and visible sort of apex that no other similar glyphs such as n or m feature, but present at the end of the l and y. The famous g loop is actually inspired by Chancery scripts, which has nothing to do with the lettering. The goal is of course to mix forms without direct reports, in order to properly celebrate this lettering spirit. This is why the e almost finishes horizontally as the Rotis – and the top a which must logically follow this principle and is drawn more round-curly. This weird choice seemed so odd to its designer that he shared his doubts and asked for advise to Jeremy Tankard who immediately was reassuring: “Oddly, your new top a is fine, it brings roundness to the typeface, when the previous pushes towards Anisette Petite to unwanted austerity.” The Anisette Petite, since its early days, is a mixture of non-consistent but charming shapes. Anisette, an Art Déco typeface Anisette Petite Club des directeurs artistiques, 46e palmarès Bukva:raz 2001

The hand lettered title found on the cover of the 1932 sheet music for “Dancing Marathon” inspired the digital revival of this unusual lettering as well as the font’s name. This eccentric Art Deco design (with a slight bit of Art Nouveau mixed in) is a thin, monoline typeface. Dancing Marathon JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions. Dance marathons got their start during the Great Depression as people desperate to earn a few dollars would enter into contests that went on for hours until the last couple remained standing on the dance floor.

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.

In the city of Millbrae (just South of San Francisco in San Mateo County, California) stands an office building which formerly housed the Millbrae Theater. California has the distinction of preserving artifacts of its past, unlike many other portions of the US, and the perpendicular "Millbrae" sign with its neon tubes and Art Deco lettering is still attached to the renovated structure. Gene Gable (a friend of type designer Jeff Levine) took a photo of the sign and sent it along as simply an image of great lettering of the past to enjoy, but it triggered the inspiration to create the namesake font Millbrae JNL.

So I made five rather odd characters for a logo for a friend… Then I thought I'd fill a couple of spare hours expanding it to a single alphabet… And some considerable time later I ended up with a whole font with full punctuation, a bunch of alternates, pretty broad international support and some OpenType features to keep things varied… There are elements of Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Lego, circuit boards and Ceefax, Memphis lamps and lab clamps, hieroglyphs, googly eyes and who knows what else… Intricate, insane, highly irregular, but somehow it hangs together… Throw down a few letters nice and big when the fancy takes you…

Our Righteous Pro was inspired by the all-capital letterforms from the deco posters of Hungarian artist Robert Berény for Modiano. Grid based and geometric in execution, the font is highly readable at a wide range of point sizes, ideal for display and print. Unlike that of its original inspiration source, Righteous has both a full lowercase and a SmallCaps set as well as an extensive figures set to increase flexibility and ease of use. Opentype features include: - SmallCaps. - Full set of Inferiors and Superiors for limitless fractions. - Tabular, Proportional, and Oldstyle figure sets (along with SmallCaps versions of the figures). - Stylistic Alternates for Caps to SmallCaps conversion.

Casagrande Collection has been designed in 2020 by the Italiantype Team (Manuel Alvaro, Valentino Coppi and Mario De Libero), working in close collaboration with Italian lettering artist, illustrator and calligrapher Alberto Casagrande, with help from the Zetafonts Team (Francesco Canovaro, Andrea Tartarelli and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini). The goal of the project was to use as inspiration Alberto's colorful, vintage themed digital illustration style to develop a suite of closely related typefaces that, used together, would allow designers to replicate the nostalgic charme of Italian poster and product design from the thirties and the forties. Two color overprints, coarse dithering, handmade calligraphy, reminiscences of art deco, hints of modernism and pop culture references: all this and more mixed in a exuberant and playful collection, created with illustrators, poster artists and book cover designers in mind. The final product is 24-font package with six display families with styles varying from the thirties-inspired Antifascista (3 weights + 3 dithering weights) and Deco (3 weights + 3 inline weights), to the modernist Casabau (5 weights), to the geometric Grind (4 widths), to the vintage elegance of the two script families, Reclame and Casatiello. The collection is complemented by a two-color icon set font, Casagrande Ornaments, allowing any designer to easily explore the creative possibilities of this incredibly powerful creative collection. Please Note: Casagrande Antifascista Ombra simulates fine dithering and may be processor intensive for some older computers. Use Casagrande Antifascista if it slows down your system.

Empire Display is a sans serif italic display face which references the styling of the 30s through to the 50s. It has a large x height and with its condensed proportions makes it ideal for headlines, posters or where large size settings are required. It has the unique feature of having the stems and cross bars slightly angled top and bottom. This also helps to create the art deco/modern feel that sets it apart from standard condensed typefaces.

The April 8, 1932 issue of The Film Daily ran an ad for a film entitled "The Sin of Lena Rivers". Hand lettered in a block style of chamfered characters, it is reminiscent of the 1920s, but still carries a touch of Art Deco influences with the thinner and extended horizontal strokes of the E, F and H. This retro sans serif design is now available digitally as Evil Ways JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

A vintage rubber stamp alphabet and star printing set had a package header with Art Deco-inspired lettering describing the product. Sold by a company called Elvin [circa late 50's-early 1960s], these Japanese-made sets were one of many distributed by independent toy importers and made in various configurations including [at times] tiny animal stamps. The type design on this particular item was the model for Retro Packaging JNL, available in both regular and oblique versions.

At the end of the 1931 gangster film “The Public Enemy” a hand lettered card offers up an afterword on the demise of Tom Powers (James Cagney’s character in the film) and how a “public enemy” is neither a man nor a character but a problem society must deal with. The text is in an Art-Deco influenced sans serif, and has been digitally recreated as Afterword JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Samuel Welo was a sign painter who had published in the 1920s and again in 1960 his “Studio Handbook – Letter and Design for Artists and Advertisers”, prolifically hand lettering all of the type style examples within the pages of the publication. In 1930 Welo also published “Lettering - Practical and Foreign”. From this book comes a thick-and-thin hand lettered Art Deco alphabet – now available digitally as Sightseeing Tour JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Arbotek has the original skeleton that the author used for the development of his typeface Arboria, a real 'architect typography', with a basic and radical approach to pure geometric forms. The three basic styles - Thin, Light and Light Rounded - try to approach the cartographic technique annotations and their output on plotters. The voluptuous style, Ultra, keeps the same structure of the Light versions, but develops as a historic Art Decó variant of this 20s and 30s graphic style.

The Wright-Regan Instrument Company (Wrico) was one of the leading manufacturers of lettering templates for many years. Aside from their own line of products, they also did custom manufacturing. A series of lettering guides called “Mimeostyle” for the A. B. Dick Company of Chicago (produced for use in making mimeograph machine printing stencils) featured an art Deco squared letter design with rounded corners. This is now available digitally as Template Sans JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

The beautiful Art Deco monoline pen lettering on the cover of a 1940s piece of sheet music inspired Central Park JNL. The 1940s was an era when couples took romantic walks along the pathways of Manhattan's Central Park or rode around it in hansom cabs. Big bands played at the major clubs and ballrooms and "uptown" meant the well-to-do. Men dressed in their tuxedos and top hats and the ladies were in their jewels and evening gowns.