Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Fashion Compressed and Engraved are the works of British designer Alan Meeks. Fashion Compressed is an elegant modern roman typeface suitable for a variety of advertising styles. The capitals can be used as initials or combined with the lower case letters. Fashion Engraved was produced when Meeks reworked Fashion Compressed, resulting in a beautiful, engraved typeface.

One of the more elegant script fonts available, this design is based on calligraphic handwriting called "Copperplate" because of the copper plates that it was etched into for reproduction. This face is not related to Copperplate [Gothic] by the American type designer, F.W. Goudy. The name Copperplate comes from the fact that writing masters used to hand-write their books and then send them to an engraver who recreated all the subtle details onto copper plates, which where then used to print the handwriting books.

Sweet Upright Script is the first release for Sweet Fonts Collection, published by MVB Fonts. It is an interpreted revival of a vintage, social engraving lettering style that was popular during the 20th Century. It is probably the first digital version of the design. With the advent of the engraving machine (a pantograph device) around 1900, commercial engraving moved from the use of hand-cut plates to the use of masterplates (lettering patterns). Lettering was traced from the masterplate using the engraving machine, letter by letter, onto a coated steel plate, that would then be etched in a chemical bath. The resulting plate was used to print engraved stationery with the raised print distinctive to the process. Many of these lettering styles were used for decades for commercial and social applications (letterheads, wedding invitations, etc.), but as they were merely traced alphabets, were not "fonts". Many remain unavailable in digital form. Over time, a number of the most popular styles were adapted to phototype, which sped up the process of plating for engraving, avoiding the need to trace each letter by hand with the engraving machine. Later, when type went digital, these phototype fonts were revived as digital fonts. As a result, the styles offered by engravers narrowed over time, as has the range of engraving styles revived in digital form.

Blackletter engraved display typeface.

Engraved shaded display typeface.

Blackletter engraved display typeface.

Madisonian has been found in a catalogue of the New York Bruce type-foundry, dated 1859. The lower cases have the feeling of a Bodoni Italic and the initials have a "spencerian" touch. This font did exist originaly in a single weight. The family has been extended with a bold and an engraved version.

The English roundhand has always occupied the central position in the group of faces appropriate to the social printing handled by engravers, and their contemporary imitators, thermographers. At the end of the nineteenth century when engraving was mechanised by the pantographic engraving machine, the traditional roundhands found their way onto pantographic pattern plates. Embassy is a traditional roundhand of vigorous contrast with straightforward capitals with ball terminals; it was transferred from such an engravers’ pattern plate to the Fotosetter at Intertype about 1955. Alphatype’s Yorktown is similar, but appears to have less contrast.

ITC Golden Cockerel font is based on designs created by Eric Gill in 1929 for the Gold Cockerel Press in England. These elegant and meticulously crafted typefaces were inspired by and modeled on Gill's skills of stone carving, calligraphy and wood engraving. The typeface family includes ITC Golden Cockerel Roman, Italic, Titling, and Initials and Ornaments.

Elizabeth ND is known for being the first typeface designed by a woman: Elizabeth Friedlander. It was engraved in 1938 by the Bauersche Gießerei. It has two styles: roman and italic. Its grace, delicacy and beauty allow many compositional possibilities, making it an ideal choice for use as a display and headline typeface. Elizabeth is a Trademark of BauerTypes SL

Based on script handwriting and engraving used in formal announcements and invitations, Riviera Script lends itself to typesetting in which an elegant mood is desired. The Riviera Script font is an upright script with an engraved appearance and decorative capitals.

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.

A rare natural history book from the early 18th century served as inspiration for the MVB Sirenne typefaces. The artisan who engraved the book—likely a map engraver—had a distinctive style of lettering that was used on the descriptive captions for the many tropical fishes depicted in the book. The plates used to print the illustrations would have been copper, the letterforms hand-engraved. The designers at MVB Fonts found the distinctive quirks of the roman letterforms and the eccentric stress of the italic interesting enough to embark on developing digital fonts based on the engraved samples. As the captions were hand-lettered, there was a great degree of variation, making a direct “revival” impossible, so Alan Dague-Greene interpreted the characteristics of the letterforms into a workable typeface design. The challenge was to retain a rustic quirkiness to the forms, yet have a typeface that was useful for more than display. The solution was to make optical sizes. The “Six” faces are full of character, but strong and open for clarity at small sizes. The design of the “Text” faces is more subtle, so that they can be used for passages of text, but retain the feel of their model. MVB Sirenne “Eighteen” and “Seventy Two” are intended for display use.

Bebas Neue is a free font which is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Designed by Ryoichi Tsunekawa. - Bebas Neue Pro has lowercases and Italics. - Bebas Neue SemiRounded are some derived, Semi rounded fonts from this Bebas Neue. - Bebas Neue Rounded are some derived, rounded fonts from this Bebas Neue. - Mocha Mattari is a distressed, vintage-effected font based on this Bebas Neue. When you need more impact for titling, please try our Kaneda Gothic, Dharma Gothic and Rama Gothic. When you need body-text font matching with this Bebas family, please try our Bio Sans font family.

A bold engraver type style with a Wall Street look.

Parquillian is a calligraphic display face with good legibility. It is based on a hand using elements of Italic, Gothic and Fraktur, developed for creating wedding certificates. It has numerous ligatures and alternates with subtle yet elegant swashes.

The engraver’s sans serif—strikingly similar to drafting alphabets of the early 1900s—has been one of the most widely used stationer’s lettering styles since about 1900. Its open, simple forms offer legibility at very small sizes. While there are digital fonts based on this style (such as Burin Sans™ and Sackers Gothic™, among others), few offer the range of styles and weights possible, with the versatility designers perhaps expect from digital type families. Sweet Sans fills that void. The family is based on antique engraver’s lettering templates called “masterplates.” Professional stationers use a pantograph to manually transfer letters from these masterplates to a piece of copper or steel that is then etched to serve as a plate or die. This demanding technique is rare today given that most engravers now use a photographic process to make plates, where just about any font will do. But the lettering styles engravers popularized during the first half of the twentieth century—especially the engraver’s sans—are still quite familiar and appealing. Referencing various masterplates—which typically offer the alphabet, figures, an ampersand, and little else—Mark van Bronkhorst has drawn a comprehensive toolkit of nine weights, each offering upper- and lowercase forms, small caps, true italics, arbitrary fractions, and various figure sets designed to harmonize with text, small caps, and all-caps. The fonts are available as basic, Standard character sets, and as Pro character sets offering a variety of typographic features and full support for Western and Central European languages. Though rich in history, Sweet Sans is made for contemporary use. It is a handsome and functional tribute to the spirit of unsung craftsmanship. Burin Sans and Sackers Gothic are trademarks of Monotype Imaging.

The engraver’s sans serif—strikingly similar to drafting alphabets of the early 1900s—has been one of the most widely used stationer’s lettering styles since about 1900. Its open, simple forms offer legibility at very small sizes. While there are digital fonts based on this style (such as Burin Sans™ and Sackers Gothic™, among others), few offer the range of styles and weights possible, with the versatility designers perhaps expect from digital type families. Sweet Sans fills that void. The family is based on antique engraver’s lettering templates called “masterplates.” Professional stationers use a pantograph to manually transfer letters from these masterplates to a piece of copper or steel that is then etched to serve as a plate or die. This demanding technique is rare today given that most engravers now use a photographic process to make plates, where just about any font will do. But the lettering styles engravers popularized during the first half of the twentieth century—especially the engraver’s sans—are still quite familiar and appealing. Referencing various masterplates—which typically offer the alphabet, figures, an ampersand, and little else—Mark van Bronkhorst has drawn a comprehensive toolkit of nine weights, each offering upper- and lowercase forms, small caps, true italics, arbitrary fractions, and various figure sets designed to harmonize with text, small caps, and all-caps. The fonts are available as basic, Standard character sets, and as Pro character sets offering a variety of typographic features and full support for Western and Central European languages. Though rich in history, Sweet Sans is made for contemporary use. It is a handsome and functional tribute to the spirit of unsung craftsmanship. Burin Sans and Sackers Gothic are trademarks of Monotype Imaging.

Sweet Titling No. 11 is a 2009 addition to the Sweet Collection of engraved lettering styles from the 20th Century. This obscure, art deco design would have been used for engraved letterhead, business cards, etc., and likely first appeared in the 1920s or ’30s.

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

Moderna Sans, a modern sans-serif inspired by the American culture, is a clean and contemporary interpretation of American Gothic typefaces like "Alternate Gothic". Moderna Sans comes in 5 weights, with matching italics, and 3 widths—condensed, standard and extended. The font's character set supports over 200 Latin-based languages. Moderna Sans is an excellent choice for branding and corporate design and a versatile 3-width workhorse suitable for newspaper or magazine headlines and subheadings.

A script font of broad nib style, both plain and engraved.

The Stuyvesant fonts include delicate incline alphabets with an engraved look.

Sweet Titling No. 22 is part of the Sweet Collection of engraved lettering styles from the 20th Century, published by MVB Fonts. This obscure, art deco design would have been used for engraved letterhead, business cards, etc., and likely first appeared in the 1920s or ’30s.