About

Everyone has seen those posters: old design, bold handmade fonts. You may even have one in your home. Those fonts now exist in digital form. Once handmade for a single use. Now available for you to use across your digital work.

The idea

It started over a coffee in a bakery in Copenhagen, the morning before a multi-week hike with my partner.

On the wall was an old Firmin Bouisset poster with the Menier girl. I looked for the font, or anything close, and found nothing. The letters had been drawn for that one job and never made into a typeface.

The idea stuck on the trail. These fonts should exist for two reasons. First, so people can use lettering that was drawn by hand and then never put into a font. Second, so design can look like something other than the same plain mono look everywhere.

Ghost Foundry is that project. Letters come off the poster, the missing ones get filled in, and the font sits next to the sheet it came from.

Questions

Can I use the fonts in commercial work?

That depends on the licence, which is decided before the first release. The options are a free licence (the SIL Open Font License) or a paid one. Either way, the licence will be printed on every font page before the download button works.

Why are the fonts not named after the brands?

Brand names on old posters are trademarks, some still in use. A font name has to be ours. Each font keeps a permanent GF code and gets a proper name before release.

Are the completed letters authentic?

No. Poster letters are cut from the scan. Missing letters are created to match that poster’s lettering, then checked against the source. The aim is a reusable font for other people’s sites and designs, not a fake antique crop.

Why only public-domain posters?

Ghost Foundry only uses public-domain poster lettering. Work still under copyright is not used. In practice that means work long out of copyright: more than 70 years after the artist’s death, or after publication for unsigned posters.

Why did some famous posters not make it?

Because the lettering would not make a usable font. Some letters are fused with the ornament around them. Some posters have almost no letters at all. And some pictures are better left alone.

Where do the poster images come from?

Public archives such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress, usually fetched through Wikimedia Commons. Each poster page links to the scan and the catalogue record. See the credits page for the full list.

Can I suggest a poster?

Yes. Send a link to the archive record through the contact link in the footer. It needs bold, legible lettering and a public-domain source.