Retro / Historical
Brush Hand New
Brush Hand New is a full font based on a copy of Flash Bold called Brush Hand marketed by WSI in the 1990s and more recently distributed through free font sites. Brush Hand was an anonymous redrawing of Flash which simplified, slightly lightened, smoothed out ragged edges, and improved the legibility of the original classic created by Edwin W. Shaar in 1939.
Enamela
Enamela (rhymes with Pamela) is based on condensed sans serif lettering found on vitreous enamel signage dating from the Victorian era and widely used for road signs, Post Office signs, the plates on James Ludlow wall postboxes, railway signs, direction signs and circular Automobile Association wayfinding plaques throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to the Medium and Bold weights found on old enamel signs, a new Regular weight and the addition of lowercase letters to match the original capitals, make Enamela Condensed a flexible and highly usable typeface.
Mythica
Mythica is a slightly condensed roman with spur serifs, derived from incised lettering on early twentieth century memorial stones and monuments. The typeface is available in 3 weights each with a complimentary italic.
Bank of England
Bank of England is loosely based on the blackletter lettering from Series F English twenty pound banknotes introduced in 2007. The font also takes inspiration from German Kanzlei (Chancery) typefaces and the 17th century London calligrapher, John Ayres.
Keep Calm
Keep Calm is a family of fonts developed from the now famous World War 2 poster that was designed in 1939 but never issued, then rediscovered in 2000. As well as the original Keep Calm font, the medium weight of the poster, new weights are now available – Keep Calm Book (regular weight), Heavy and Light – and each weight now comes with a free italic. The family contains Central European and Western European accented characters.
Component
Component evokes the aesthetics of machine-readable matrix barcodes such as QR and Aztec codes, but it could just as easily invoke ancient rituals from a lost civilization. Component is a book-weight, condensed goemetric font with patterns of meaning that lie somewhere between mechanization and magic. And there’s a free italic.
Savor
Savor is a script-ish typeface family that oozes exotic; it’s lively and luscious, flamboyant yet dignified. Like other recent K-Types, the fonts include the new Indian Rupee sign. Savor is designed to look just as good all in capitals as it does in title or lower case, and it’s currently available in four weights – Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic . The Regular is free to download for personal use.