Category Archives: Classic Fonts
St. Nicholas: The Christmas Font
St. Nicholas is based on the title lettering from the early 20th century childrens magazine St. Nicholas, published by the Warne company, which is perhaps best known for publishing the works of Beatrix Potter. The magazine featured several different title styles over the years, but this particular design stood out so we designed a complete font based on it. It’s …
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Classic Font: Goodfellow
Goodfellow was first released in the spring of 1993. It was based on Art Nouveau period metal type designed for titles and logos. It became a surprise hit when Tim Burton used it as the title font for his hit animated film A Nightmare Before Christmas later that year. The downside was that we had released a demo version at …
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Classic Comix – A New Font
BUY NOW Tired of Comic Sans (who isn’t?) but need another font to do captions and clear, informal text? What would be better than a true comic font based on authentic lettering from classic horror comics. Our Classic Comix font is exactly that. Clasic Comix has two full upper case character sets and full punctuation and it comes with …
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Arakne, a Classic Font
Arakne is an unusual font derived from samples of Spencerian Script, which pre-dated italic and cursive as an academic handwriting style taught in schools. The style was popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. The style is tall and spidery and often thought of as the handwriting of elderly ladies. The Arakne font can create powerful decorative text …
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Gloriana Font
Gloriana was originally released in 1999 based on samples of hand lettering in an illustrated childrens book from the early 1900s. It was one of several conceptually similar fonts we did during that period, including Gaiseric, Rosalinde, Scurlock and Folkard. For some reason Folkard was the big hit of the various fantasy themed fonts we did as part of that …
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Adramalech – Featured Classic Font
BUY NOW Adramalech is one of our classic font designs, based on a very bold early 20th century sign lettering style and then regularized and developed into a full typeface. This new release version of Adramalech has new secondary characters and custom spacing and kerning as well as foreign language characters for major European languages. Adramalech is excellent …
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Classic Font: Valdemar
Valdemar has been very popular for book designs, movies and merchandising. It was selected as the official title font for merchandised products for the Harry Potter movies, but the similarity between the name Valdemar and the character Lord Voldemort is coincidental. The name Valdemar actually comes from a story by Edgar Allan Poe and the font was released before the …
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Ariosto Font – Featured
BUY NOW Ariosto is the very first Art Nouveau font we developed. It has gone through several versions, because like many of our early fonts there were elements that needed improvement. Now that it’s a mature font it is much refined and an excellent example of Art Nouveau type design. Ariosto features a full upper and lower case character set, …
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Adresack Font Revised
Adresack is an original font in an arts and crafts style. It is one of the first fonts we did – back in 1996 – entirely by construction directly in Fontographer. It was inspired by the lettering styles of designers like Charles Rennie MacKintosh and Jessie M. King. The accompanying graphic features an Arts and Crafts style fireplace because that’s …
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Classic Font: Brandywine
Brandywine is one of our favorite older fonts. It’s based on a hand lettering style used by legendary American artist Howard Pyle for a number of his books, including Pepper and Salt and The Lady of Shalott. It’s a uniquely readable style in the Arts and Crafts tradition, with open characters and variations in letter positioning which make it interesting. …
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Acadian Font
Acadian is based on a classic Victorian-era metal typeface designed by H. H. Thorp in 1883. It is one of our earliest historic typeface digitizations, taken directly from new printed samples made for us from a complete set of the metal type in 1994 by noted type collector Steve Saxe. The look of Acadian is unique and classically Victorian with …
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Montgisard Font
There are certain design concepts which deserve more than one exploration. One of those is the combination of gothic elements with more more traditional Roman-style lettering. Classic font designer and calligrapher Rudolph Koch liked the idea as demonstrated in our Koch Gothic font. The idea of combining Roman capitals with a gothic lowercase is the basis of our new Montgisard …
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Rossetti – A Classic Font Revised
BUY NOW We first released the Rossetti font in 1994. It was originally developed from samples of 19th century type for a book cover design. Since then we’ve seen it in all sorts of uses from packaging for tea to signage at the local farmers market. The original shareware version has been widely disseminated and has always annoyed …
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Classic Font: Scurlock Updated
Scurlock was originally developed back in 2001 and has been one of our most popular fonts in the fantasy genre since that time. It has been particularly popular for the covers of fantasy novels, with its dramatic and stylized characters. One of the shortcomings of the original version of Scurlock was that it had a set of custom small-caps instead …
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John Speed Font Collection
To our great shame we have neglected and overlooked the collection of John Speed calligraphic fonts which we released in 2001. This great set of 3 fonts is based on 17th century cartographer’s calligraphy takes from examples in the maps of British cartographer John Speed. The collection includes three original fonts, John Speed, John Speed Ornamental and John Speed Lowercase. …
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Futuristic Fonts – Updated and Expanded
It’s not easy to define what the future of font design will be, but we can certainly identify fonts which look like something from what we imagine the future to be. Fonts with a high-tech, mechanical look are always considered futuristic, and there are certain styles which have come to be associated with science fiction and other futuristic themes.
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