font_designer: Dan Solo

Alaska

Alaska font

This interesting type was introduced by the Chicago firm of Marder, Luse & Company in 1890, about the time designers were beginning to lose some of the excessive ruffles and flourishes that characterized the...

Arcade

Arcade font

A neat face with pronounced spur serifs which several foundries have already digitized. We like ours better though, because we have drawn a lowercase which was lacking in the original. Barnhart Bros. & Spindler...

Bareback

Bareback font

The devil does indeed find work for idle hands. This was designed by Dan X. Solo about with no excuse whatsoever. The name comes from the fact that a circus that we regularly did...

Valjean

Valjean font

Here is a wood type from Tubbs & Co., about 1900. Its lack of decoration reflects the changes that were rapidly occurring in the design of printed pieces at the beginning of the 1900s....

Flo Barnum

Flo Barnum font

No telling how old this font is, because it came from Hamilton, a firm that was late in the wood type business, but was the repository of many older patterns from earlier wood type...

Gashouse Gang

Gashouse Gang font

This font was adapted from an old lettering book, circa 1900. The book got away from us many years ago, but we had made stats of all the potentially useful fonts. Original had no...

Hattan Antique

Hattan Antique font

This font is a somewhat modified version of the original issued by the Manhattan Type Foundry in the 1880s. This New York foundry was in business for less than five years, so its fonts...

Blue Point

Blue Point font

We began with the Victorian font Dotted, so-called because the counters of many of the letters contained a dot. We knocked out the dots, added a lowercase, and voila! a more useful type than...

Contract Banner

Contract Banner font

Our penchant for banner types lives on. This one is our take on an 1880s font called Mezzotint. Banner fonts give the appearance of art work, without having to do any. We like that.

Donaldina

Donaldina font

This came from an early-1900s lettering book. Never was an actual font, but it has a quaint look that should be useful. We hate to see alphabets just fade away, which is why we...