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.

Successful Layout & Design

Faust Lettering

By Carl Shank • July 11, 2025
Charles Ayers Faust (b. 1860) was an American calligrapher and typographic designer known primarily for his 1912 compendium Faust’s 75 New Alphabets , a richly illustrated manual of lettering techniques. Published in Chicago by the C. W. Braithewait Company, this 72‑page volume is now in the public domain. CARE Typography, in its mission to digitally restore older typography, has restored some of Faust's designs for the modern type world. 75 unique alphabets for artistic lettering, including brush, air-brush, air-pencil, relief, stencil, marking, shading, and both ornate (Payzant, Soennecken) and practical “common pen” styles. They are Highly visual, serving as both an instructional guide and inspirational specimen book for sign-writers, designers, artists, and printers of the early 20th century.  Samples are below, available from CARE Typography .

Typography and Religion in the De Stijl Movement

By Carl Shank • July 8, 2025
The De Stijl (Dutch for “The Style”) typographical and art movement emerged around 1917 and significantly influenced modern art, design and thought itself. In the wake of the chaos of World War I, the movement sought to express a new vision of harmony and order. De Stijl was not just an art style, but a comprehensive aesthetic philosophy. It sought universal beauty, as abstracted from individual beauty, and a visual language and typography based on simplicity, geometry and primary colors, namely red, blue and yellow. Its core characteristics were the use of straight horizonal and vertical lines, the use of rectangles and squares, an emphasis on asymmetry, and the favoring of pure abstraction. De Stijl was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Neo-Plasticism, a theory developed by Piet Mondrian, which sought to depict reality in a pure, universal form. Behind this philosophy was the religious thrust of Theosophy, particularly the spiritual writings of Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) and Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925).
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