Antique Tuscan No.9 was one of the earlier wood-type designs by William Hamilton Page. It was first shown among the specimens produced in 1859, shortly after Page entered into a new partnership with Samuel Mowry, owner of the Mowry Axle Company. The new company was named Page and Company and was located at the Mowry facility in the Greenville section of Norwich, Connecticut. Antique Tuscan No.9 is an extra-condensed version of the tuscan style that had been released in moveable type by Vincent Figgins of London in 1817 and had become so popular for advertising in the intervening years. Because of the extreme compression in the design, we might be tempted to describe it as "Triple-X," but that might be misleading. The analogy would, of course, be to clothing sizes, not movie ratings. Because of the compression, this typeface reads best when set extra-extra-extra large. For printing, we recommend 36 points or larger. For the screen, we suggest at least 72 points. An unusual and distinctive design, it is best used with discretion. If I were doing a term paper for school or submitting an article to a magazine for publication, I might use it for the title page, to grab someone’s attention. I would certainly not use it for the main body of text - not if I expected anyone to read what I wrote. If you wonder why we make this recommendation, take the Ten-Point challenge. Print this paragraph using Antique Tuscan No.9 and set the font size at 10 points. If you are young and blessed with good eyesight, you will probably be able to read it - with effort. So, here is the challenge: hand it to your Grandmother and ask HER to read it.

Pusekatt means Pussycat in Norwegian. It was finished on a rather gloomy monday, which reminded me of Norway and I just like cats. There you have it: the naming of fonts explained. It ain't rocket science for sure! There is nothing gloomy about Pusekatt font: it is a very lively, happy and useful poster face. It comes with extensive language support, one alternative (yes, one) and a lot of feline grace.

Chapeau is loosely inspired by a Johnny Cash letter written on an old IBM typewriter. The original typeface called “Doric” was a rare example of a proportionally aligned typewriter face, supplied by IBM in the late 1960s. Based on simple geometric shapes, Chapeau is a low contrast sans-serif with rounded endings. The letterforms have been carefully aligned to avoid exceeding width and to achieve an efficient, contemporary appearance.

ITC Luna is the work of Japanese designer Akira Kobayashi. He turned to the designs of the 1930s for his inspiration for both ITC Luna and ITC Silvermoon. Luna is designed to fill the gap between a pure Art Deco display face and an ordinary text face," says Kobayashi. "It has an Art Deco style but is still fairly easy to read. It can be used in short passages of text. As for individual characters, I especially liked the distinctive O, shaded only on one side. Lowercase a and g are also unusual, but they are somehow legible enough in text matter." And for a finishing touch on his Luna, Kobayashi added the charming moon face as an extra character.

FranklinGothicHandLight is part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

FranklinGothicHandDemi is part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

Venecian Old Face fonts had a strong influence on typeface design in the 1930s and 1940s in England. Such influence is evident in the font Electra, designed by William A. Dwiggins for Linotype in 1935. Electra combines its classic roots with the Zeitgeist of the 1930s, also displaying characteristics of the Bauhaus and Art Deco styles.

Originally designed in 2005 to be used in a brochure project, Jessica is a typewriter face with a sinister mood. Its peculiar original features have been retained but on the other hand, the font has had a monospacing treatment and some Open Type programming added for a more contemporary feel. The extended character set covers most European languages.

Otto Weisert was a German type founder who ran his own foundry in Stuttgart during the early years of the 20th Century. In 1902, he created Kalligraphia, a cursive Art Nouveau display script face. Kalligraphia has a unique stroke contrast model; the tops and bottoms of its letterforms are thicker than the verticals on its sides.

Kaleidoxope is my hand-drawn headline font. However, I traced the font digitally to make it look more smooth - but still kept the handmade look. As usual it has that well known pizzadude mixture of funk, grafitti and a teaspoon of madness! Comes with alternate characters for double lettering and a swashy version of most letters! Enjoy! :)

This loopy offering is patterned after a typeface from the 1888 specimen book from the Central Type Foundry of St. Louis, called simply "Spiral". The ragged contours on the original face have been smoothed out, but it still is an attention-getter. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

Wardruna Arabic is a method of writing Arabic with a Runic-like alphabet devised by Devin Lester. He imagined that if some vikings had settled in the Middle East, they might have started speaking Arabic and writing it with a version of the Runic alphabet. This particular alphabet is based on Tolkien's Cirth Runes. A band of vikings went to Baghdad after raiding in Europe. The markets in Constantinople were closed as the Turks had just sacked the city. These men had heard of the great market in Baghdad and went there to sell their wares, seeing that this land was warm and fertile they decided to stay. They ended up settling the land and taking Arab wives and having children, because of thier Northern European accent their Arabic evolved into a part-Arabic dialect of Iraqi arabic. This is why today you see a few Arabs with green eyes and dark blonde or red hair. The Arabic alphabet was too fluid for them and vikings disdained the use of paper as a persons writings could be burned, so the evolved their runes to fit Arabic.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.

Years ago the company that developed Fontographer marketed a program called Font-o-Matic, a program that distorted fonts in various ways. 99% of what it produced was garbage, but every once in a while it would yield something interesting. Since I had designed a lot of typefaces by that time, I had lots of material to feed it and it was fun to see what it produced. YahoschWormy is one of rare results that was interesting enough to save and clean up. The source font was Yahosch.

Years ago the company that developed Fontographer marketed a program called Font-o-Matic, a program that distorted fonts in various ways. 99% of what it produced was garbage, but every once in a while it would yield something interesting. Since I had designed a lot of typefaces by that time, I had lots of material to feed it and it was fun to see what it produced. KolkFizzy is one of rare results that was interesting enough to save and clean up. The source font is Kolkman.

Years ago the company that developed Fontographer marketed a program called Font-o-Matic, a program that distorted fonts in various ways. 99% of what it produced was garbage, but every once in a while it would yield something interesting. Since I had designed a lot of typefaces by that time, I had lots of material to feed it and it was fun to see what it produced. BaumSquiggle is one of rare results that was interesting enough to save and clean up. The source font is Baumfuss.

Lectio is a Roman font based on a Venetian Renaissance early typefaces, but with a modern and expressive design. His obvious calligraphic influence favors continuous text reading. The generous internal "eye" gives Lectio an appropriate legibility, its soft and organic modulation avoids fatigue, its robust character is attractive and stimulating in large bodies, especially for use in headlines. Lectio comes in two versions: Lectio and Lectio B. Lectio has seven weight and their corresponding slanted variables (true italics). Lectio B is composed only of Italics in six weight. The ascenders are slightly lower, the descending are more regular and the oblique trace of some letters have a more constant rhythm. Each of these faces has the optimum amount of contrast agains the background and clear and open internal letter shape. These fonts include diacritics for CE languages, Old Style figures, standard and discretional ligatures.

This face was recommended to me by Mark Solsburg, president of FontHaus. At first I was a bit reluctant to revive it, if for no other reason than Frederic Goudy’s admission that he created this design “in a moment of typographic weakness.” However, I put the sample that Mark sent me up on my bulletin board, and over a period of time, it grew on me. It finally got to the point that I had to recreate the face, and from the response that I’ve gotten, I’m glad I did! Uppercase only with numerals and punctuation.

Is Rundigsburg a calligraphic face morphing into sans serif or sans serif reverting back to a medieval, calligraphic face? The letters are angular and some retain traces of older letter forms, but the ornamentation is gone. Rundigsburg is decorative but also very legible, suitable for both display and some text purposes. The family has four weights, each with an italics style. There are two shadowed versions and each has an "inside" style designed for uses in layers with its shadowed style to add color. These "inside" style are similar to the light style but the spacing matches its shadowed complement. Among Rundigburgs OpenType features are a few basic fractions and some alternative letter forms.

Black Drum is a rare revival typewriter face, made digital from analog samples gathered with great care by Coniglio Type. A time and place; type and life. Black Drum is contemporary designer type, made from the struck steel hammers of an Art Deco Period san serif face transferred from a mechanical 1926 custom editor Royal Portable typewriter. Anna Conroy of Type Heritage, LLC, Philadelphia comments on Black Drum and its new place in time today: “Wow! nice lookin’ face Joseph! —Perfect, somewhere between Cable; [Rudolph Koch, 1927] (which was about the first transatlantic telegraph cable) with its raised x-height; and Futura [Paul Renner, 1928]. Yup, it has that great “Monopoly Game” question mark -- and all on a period-piece typewriter! You should have no trouble grafting that sorely needed Euro symbol.” –And he very well did! Author: Joseph Coniglio Producer: Coniglio Type MyFonts debut: October 2021

Warm and inviting— DeSoto is a titling face sure to add a touch of grace to many projects. Its name and inspiration come from a few letters in a 1958 DeSoto magazine advertisement. Many automobile ads back then used wide faces to create a feeling of luxury and elegance. DeSoto gives you that same feeling, but in a more contemporary fashion. DeSoto’s extended width characters show a hint of old school aesthetics. It comes in four styles all featuring a balance of caps and smallcaps. As a titling face, DeSoto will work in all kinds of setting; well… maybe not death metal flyers, but who knows? Taking advantage of OpenType programming, DeSoto features include alternate characters, fractions, oldstyle figures, ligatures, case-sensitive punctuation, ornaments and swashes, and Central European language support. All features, including ornaments, are included with each weight, taking full advantage of the OpenType format.

Woodstock is a round, heavy, lovable serif display typeface. Just as music brought many together in the spirit of love during the 1960s and the Woodstock music festival, this face brings a smile to the eye of the beholder. Many traces of the hand can be seen in the curves and the joins of Woodstock's forms. Try using Woodstock in headlines, logos, or greeting cards, in point sizes from 12 on upward.

Mittwoch is an extended modern serif and a new companion to insigne's Montag and Dienstag extended sans serifs. Mittwoch conveys a graceful air with its high-contrast letterforms and its ball terminals, but also includes some unique touches that are unexpected for modern faces. Mittwoch includes four different weights and 50 alternate characters, including swashes, more traditional modern letterforms and simplified characters for titling or when a more unique look is needed.

The appeal of Calisto as a text face lies in its very even color on the page, while its robust construction means that it can work equally well at display sizes. The slightly calligraphic treatment of letter shapes and the classical proportions give Calisto a clean elegance on the page. The Calisto font is a graceful and interesting addition to the typographer's repertoire and will prove particularly useful for book, magazine and advertising work.

A classic font design remastered by the type foundry Intellecta Design, from the extra-rare Bruce's New York typefoundry from 1882. Distressed and antique, use this font in display purposes for a stylized type design. Great display face for headers and antique-like projects. Contains a limited amount of letter designs. Using the "0" and "2" keys you get two different fleurons to start words. Use "1" or "3" keys to close words with fleurons.

Gravure was designed by Morris F. Benton in 1927 for American Type Founders and was also released in 1929 by the London foundry of C. W. Shortt. This luminous face has a slightly naïve charm seldom found in incised typefaces. Ornamental and engaging, it’s a perfect choice for headlines with warmth and grace. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin and 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan) character sets.

Foverdis is a versatile and powerful ornate script face. Foverdis features flowing hand lettering with tall and graceful ascenders. The face offers a wide array of weights, from the powerful Black weight to the graceful Thin to unique Hairline. Foverdis can get the job done for many unique design tasks. Its wide range of weights at a great price, and OpenType alternates make it a very valuable font for your design toolbox. Foverdis OpenType features include a set of non-connecting alternates, 20 ligatures, and two types of ending letterforms. OpenType features include ornaments, a full set of swashes, swash endings, ending contextual alternates, discretionary ligatures, ligatures and twelve different stylistic sets filled with alternates. In total, there are over 150 alternate letterforms and ornaments. Please see the sample .pdf to see these features in action. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Foverdis is great for a professional designer that wants to maximize design capabilities.

FranklinGothicHandCond is another part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked in advertising. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past, Gert Wiescher.

FranklinGothicHandBold is another part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked in advertising. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

A diverse assortment of woodtype adornments, including bishop’s fingers, vignettes, border elements, flourishes and other what-nots, all thoughtfully redrawn from authentic historical sources, and ready to grace your next project with their vintage charm. Please note: for reason known only to the font gods, the Mac Postscript version of Woody Goodies 2 had to be named More Woody Goodies.

Eckhardt Slabserif JNL is a bold, condensed slab serif font that's perfect for attention-getting headlines, signs, banners, price cards or any printed project where a strong type face is needed. Its name (as others in a series of sign shop-oriented fonts) is Jeff Levine's way of honoring his friend Al Eckhardt, who ran Allied Signs in Miami until his passing.

Coupler is a sturdy text face with low contrast, airy counters, and a strong baseline for smaller sizes and extended reading. Lightly bracketed serifs and pleasantly conspicuous italics temper Coupler’s formal demeanor—well suited for financial reports, news magazines, catalogs, academic journals, and any instructional setting. Four weights with italics and advanced typographical support provide design flexibility in any layout.

The 1920 song “Noah’s Wife Lived a Wonderful Life (‘Cause Noah Had to Stay Home)” is another example of one of those overly-worded song titles from early 20th Century composers. What’s more important for type enthusiasts is that the title was hand lettered with a round nib pen in a slightly ragged Art Nouveau style. Cleaning up the ragged design, the end result became Nouveau Showcard JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

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.

Bunyan Pro is the synthesis of Bunyan, the last face Eric Gill designed for hand setting in 1934 and Pilgrim, the machine face based on it, issued by British Linotype in the early 1950s — the most popular Gill text face in Britain from its release until well into the 1980s. Gill’s last face doesn't date itself anywhere near as obviously as Gill’s other serif faces, which were all really products of their time, heavily influenced by the richly ornamental and constantly changing aesthetic trends of the interwar period. When compared to Gill’s previous work, Bunyan seems like a revolution in the way he thought and drew. It’s as if he was shrugging off all heavy burden of what was popular, and going back to the basics of older standards. Bunyan had no bells and whistles, doesn't risk functionality with contrasts that are too high or too low, and didn't venture far outside the comfortable oldstyle rhythm Gill grew up with. By interbellum standards, this was utter austerity, a veritable denial of deco excess. Surprisingly, even without all the cloying trivialities, Bunyan still stood indisputably as an aesthetically pleasing, space saving design that could have been made only by Eric Gill. Bunyan Pro comes in three weights and their italics. The main font is intended for use between 8 and 14 points. The medium and the bold are great for emphasis but also have good merit in larger sizes, so can make effective display types as well. All six fonts include small caps, ligatures, alternates, six sets of figures, and three original Gill manicules. We tried to keep the best features of the handset (Bunyan) and machine (Pilgrim) versions while building a text face that can function in today’s immersive reading media. Deciding on which useful letterpress features to preserve for aesthetic importance was hell on our eyeballs — which lead to complex and painstaking ways of ironing out irregularities and inconsistencies related to metal technologies, in order to provide something with authenticity. The result is a unique typeface based on a Gill design that, to a much greater extent than any of his other faces, works well as a text face that can be used for entire books and magazines. For more information on Bunyan Pro’s character set, features, development process and some print tests, please consult the PDF in the gallery section of this page.

When Sputnik launched in 1957, the world was launched into the Space Age, baby! It was rockets and soda shops, souped-up jalopies and Fairlane convertibles with radios blaring. Rock and Roll. American Bandstand and the Race to Space. Astro aims to call back those exciting days with a look that might have graced the sign of your local drive-in or donut shop. The uppercase characters look like they could fly, suggesting spacecraft, UFOs. Use it for Retro future events or business branding. It also seems to work exceptionally well, strangely, with French, Icelandic, Japanese and African names and anything to do with fish.

It’s alive! Insigne’s new creation, Daito, is now functional, built to process your logos, business cards, magazine layouts, packaging and more without the slightest glitch. But this new slab serif is no heartless churn of the same factory nuts and bolts. Daito is designed to greet your reader with a friendly face. Inspired by types from the era of the Space Race, this new take on some old faces brings a contemporized, unique set of serif forms to the font race. Daito comes complete with a variety of weights to help you find the best settings for your current needs or moods. Need soft and playful? Daito light communicates its message gently with softened serif. Need a different feel with more authority? With the touch of a few buttons, engage the powerful Black or striking Bold. Additional features with Daito include stylistic alternates, ligatures, titling capitals and small caps among other typographic features. Please note: use magical OpenType-savvy applications such as Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXPress, etc to keep your font from malfunctioning, shorting, attacking people, or attempting a world takeover. Daito also speaks Western, Eastern, and Central European languages. However, Japanese is not available for this edition. It’s not every day you find a top-of-the-line font like Daito. This machine can handle most anything on your list, short of folding your laundry (though it may make your laundry look nicer). Don’t wait. Order yours today while supplies last.

Back in the nineties I had a deck of Tarot cards. It was part interest and part curiosity, but I also liked the look of them. My readings were just for fun; I thought it was all a joke, but when people started to return for more readings (because what I had predicted actually happened), I quit. That was way out of my comfort zone! Fortune Teller is a nice brush font. I made it with one of my late father in law’s Chinese brushes and ink. It comes with all diacritics and a set of alternate glyphs. If you buy this font, you will meet with a tall and handsome stranger and you will win the lottery. Guaranteed! Haha!

PT Quadrat Grotesk™ was designed for ParaType in 2001 by Vladimir Pavlikov. An expanded sans serif with square letterforms due to what the face was named. Based on the shapes of one of old Russian wooden types. Wooden types were used for placard display composition at large sizes. Their printouts retained wooden texture and traces of handling. These features are reflected in the shapes of Quadrat Grotesk. It is a good typeface for display and advertising typography.