Seven Revived Fonts

Carl Shank • January 6, 2025

Seven Revived Fonts. CARE Typography is pleased to introduce seven fonts, revived from Phillips Old Fashioned Type Book (New York, 1945). The CrayonetteCare font has been ably presented elsewhere by David Jonathan Ross as Crayonette DTR (https://djr.com/notes/crayonette-djr-font-of-the-month) in 2017 and is also available on Adobe fonts. Crayonette was designed by Henry Brehmer in 1889 and first issued by Philadelphia’s Keystone Type Foundry. It is a weird and wonderful Victorian design that, to Ross's knowledge, had never received a suitable digital revival. And thanks to research by Indra Kupferschmid, he also found out that Crayonette came in an Inline version as well, and also appeared under various other names such as Almah, Columbian Italic, Fantaisie, Italienne Cursiv, and Zierschrift. The CrayonetteCare font version here has been digitized by CARE Typography using the Phillip's font samples book, sample #30C.


The DaintyCare font (Sample #775 from Phillips) is a light an airy typeface with both Caps and smaller case lettering. What is notable is the distinctive "Q" and "Z" letters. Note also the capital "H" and the unique ampersand "&" of the font. The GlypticCare typeface does not have all the numerals and is primarily a caps only font. The fancy ampersand is to be noted in this rendering. Glyptic is an ornamented Latin serif designed in 1878 by Herman Ihlenburg  and issued by the Philadelphia type foundry Mackellar, Smiths and Jordan. David Ross produced a fine rendering of the Glyptic font and it is also available on Adobe fonts.


The PenelopeCare font is a decorative typeface digitized from the Phillips book of old fonts. Its original version of all caps was designed and offered by Typographer Mediengestaltung, by  Dieter Steffmann, Kreuztal, Germany, and is part of a package of 357 old time fonts. A more developed rendering has been offered by Dan Solo of Solotype in Cleveland in 2004 on myfonts.com. That version is $19.95 from MyFonts. Steffmann has offered Penelope as a free font, for both personal and commercial use. He writes — "For several years, I have completed not only erroneous public domain fonts, but I have digitized or vectorized complete fonts. Nowadays, even high-quality fonts are available and affordable for everyone. Therefore, I have specialized in collecting and digitizing "blackletter" (Fraktur) fonts, which have no market value to large font houses because of insufficient demand, and are therefore generally not available for purchase. Since I consider fonts to be cultural heritage, I do not agree with their commercialization. Fonts once made out of metal type obviously had a price along with their metal value, and the cost of designing, cutting and casting is convincing, particularly since the buyer also acquired ownership of the purchased fonts! Anyone who believes that they can buy a magazine now a days and then have the property acquired as in the times of metal setting, is wrong: The font foundries only sell "licenses" for a file of nothing but "zeros and ones" with no real material value, and the buyer usually does not become the owner, but only a licensee! For all these reasons I am giving out my fonts to everyone for free for commercial purposes without any restrictions and I hope you enjoy in these fonts as much as I and many other font-friends around the world do!" The PenelopeCare font is therefore free to all who want it from CARE Typography.


The Antique Pointed Caps font (#56C from Phillips) with numerals is a bold, blackletter font with distinctive squared off edges. The Old Flemish font (#18 from Phillips) has the telling characteristics of pre-Victorian days with abundant flourishes. The Ornament91 font has slim lines and accented flourishes. These seven fonts are also available from CARE Typography and can be ordered from our email site — cshanktype@gmail.com — for a small fee. They can also be ordered as a group for $35.

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Typeface Characteristics: Which Type Where?

By Carl Shank • September 9, 2026
Typeface characteristics are the visual and structural features that distinguish one typeface from another. They determine a typeface’s historical appearance, readability, personality, and appropriate use. Useful Ways to Analyze Any Typeface. When examining an unfamiliar typeface, ask these questions in order (provided by ChatGPT) — Does it have serifs? What kind of serifs? How much thick/thin contrast is present? What is the stress angle? What is the x-height? How wide or narrow are the letters? How are the counters constructed? What do the terminals look like? What are distinctive letters such as a, g, e, R, and Q doing? How does the typeface behave in a paragraph—open, dark, dense, airy, mechanical, or calligraphic? What historical or technological process does its construction suggest? What personality does the combination of these characteristics produce? There are a number of online sources to help identify typefaces ( See Feb. 6, 2022 Blog for more explanation and use.) Sources include — MyFonts ( www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont ), FontSquirrel ( www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator ) WhtFontIs ( www.whatfontis.com ) Identifont ( www.identifont.com ) is one of the best. Here are the questions it will ask you — Does it have feet (serifs) or not (sans-serifs)? What style is the tail on uppercase Q? What style is the ampersand (the &)? Is the numeral “4” open or closed? What style of vertical line does the Dollar sign ($) have? How high is the center vertex of the uppercase M? Sit on the line or not? What type of bar does the uppercase G have? How far below the baseline does the uppercase J extend? What about the uppercase R? How far does the center bar extend? Is there a gap with the vertical part of the letter? Does it meet or cross the vertical? What about the question mark (?) What shape is the dot at the bottom? Is it circular, square, triangular, rectangular or even missing? The important point is that a typeface should not be identified by a single characteristic. Its identity comes from the interaction of serifs, contrast, stress, proportions, counters, terminals, spacing, and letterform construction.

More on Variable Fonts (2)

By Carl Shank • September 5, 2026
Google’s variable font selection includes IBM Plex Sans, Inter, Newsreader, Open Sans, Playfair Display, Express Fraunces and Roboto. FF Meta Variable is now a licensed font from Monotype (myFonts.com). Formata Variable is a demonstration only font from CARE Typography. We consider two Google Variable typefaces here — Playfair Display and Express Fraunces. Playfair Display Playfair Display is a high-contrast transitional/display serif typeface designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen and released through Google Fonts in 2011. It was designed primarily for large display sizes, especially headlines, titles, and editorial typography. Its appearance draws inspiration from the late eighteenth-century transition from traditional broad-nib writing toward pointed steel pens, as well as from the elegant typefaces associated with the European Enlightenment and neoclassical period. Playfair Display is a contemporary high-contrast serif designed primarily for display typography. Its visual ancestry lies in the 18th-century transitional period, particularly the movement from broad-nib calligraphic forms toward the sharper, more vertical forms that ultimately produced Didot and Bodoni.
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