Fonts drawn from street signs and painted lettering
Typefaces based on hand-painted shop signs, truck art, railway boards and protest placards from cities around the world.
Open Late
Long before vinyl cutters and LED panels, the words on a street were painted by hand. Every city had sign writers with their own habits, and their work gave places a visual accent as distinct as a spoken one: the fat, shaded capitals of Indian trucks, the brush lettering on Vietnamese shopfronts, the old posters and shop signs of Buenos Aires, the rounded script on a neighborhood grocery. As that craft disappears, type designers have been recording it.
The fonts here each name a street source in their records. Most show the hand behind them. Strokes swell where the brush was pressed and thin where it lifted; letters lean; proportions follow the painter's eye more than any grid. Some keep deliberate flaws. That is what separates them from tidy corporate signage faces, which are covered in the wayfinding collection.
Use them where warmth and locality matter: restaurant fronts, market stalls, festival posters, packaging with a regional story, editorial features about a place. Most are heavy single-weight designs meant for a few words at large size. Several support the script of the region they come from alongside Latin, and the notes say which.
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Vina Sans
Modeled on Vietnamese street signs, flyers and posters, flaws included.
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Yatra One
Brush-style letters modeled on hand-painted Mumbai railway signs, with Devanagari.
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Shrikhand
Shaped by hand-painted street lettering in Gujarat, for Gujarati and Latin.
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Montserrat
Records the lettering of old posters and signs in a Buenos Aires neighborhood as a clean geometric sans, in nine weights with italics.
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Honk
A variable color font based on the painted lettering of Indian trucks.
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Alkatra
Modeled on letters painted on walls in Bengal with a stick dipped in tar, for Bengali, Devanagari, Odia and Latin.
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Londrina Solid
Rooted in São Paulo street writing, in four weights from Thin to Black.
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Poetsen One
Heavy, rounded letters modeled on hand-painted supermarket signs.
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Goblin One
Wide, heavy letters with sharp triangular serifs, modeled on a sign painted by hand above an English pub.
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Arizonia
A pointed-brush script whose starting point was the lettering on a construction truck.
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Protest Strike
A heavy compact sans drawn after protest signs.
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Tilt Warp
A heavy geometric sans on a sign painter's letter model, inspired by dimensional shop-window signage, with two rotation axes.
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Bungee
Built around the look of city shop signs: very heavy, near-square capitals made to stack down a narrow strip as well as run in a line.
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Bungee Shade
Outlined capitals with a solid drop shade, from a family that pays tribute to city signs and can stack vertically.
Samples load a basic Latin subset of each family. Every family here carries an open license; its page states the terms and offers the original files.
Questions about fonts drawn from street signs and painted lettering
What is vernacular lettering?
Everyday lettering made by local sign writers and tradespeople, outside professional type design. These fonts preserve styles from particular cities and regions.
Can I use these fonts for a real shop sign?
Yes. Every font here is under the SIL Open Font License, which allows commercial use, including fabricated and painted signs based on the letterforms.
Do these fonts support languages other than English?
Several include the script of their home region, such as Devanagari, Gujarati or Bengali, or Vietnamese accents. Check the note and the language section of each font page.