About Jeff Levine Fonts
Jeff Levine has been in love with lettering since the third grade, when a schoolmate brought a lettering stencil into class. He has worked in both the graphics and music industries, and began his work with digital type via his own site, which hosted over one hundred free dingbat fonts until its retirement. Although these fonts were experimental at best, Jeff received "thank you" letters from points all over the world for making his designs available. Encouraged by these responses, Jeff decided to set his sights on creating interesting and commercially viable type fonts.
Beginning with his own nostalgia-inspired type designs along with some original concepts, Jeff settled into releasing his versions of some recognizable classics, then started digging deep into what he calls 'lost' or 'forgotten' faces -- hand lettering from many sources that was only intended to fulfill an advertising requirement for its time and never considered to have any future as a potential typeface.
Inspiration came from retail packaging, lettering and marking devices, vintage signage, movie posters, screen credits and film trailers, sheet music, government posters, advertising fliers, magazine ads, trade brochures and catalogs, prefabricated letters and numbers for the sign trade and so much more...
Anything was fair game from the Victorian era right up through the 1970s if it offered lettering that might be unique in some sort of way. Some people within the film industry have told Jeff that they preferred his fonts for period pieces because they more realistically reflected a time or era. Those fonts maintained many of the original quirks or stylistic touches the original lettering artists had in their own design concepts...
From a simple beginning with only ten designs in January of 2006, the library has grown to well over 2,200 offerings and covers many styles including Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Victorian, 1950s Post-Modern, 1960s, 1970s and a little of everything in between.