Eckhardt Poster Text JNL continues Jeff Levine’s series of sign painter-oriented fonts, named in honor of his good friend Albert Eckhardt, Jr. (who ran Allied signs in Miami, Florida from 1959 until his passing).

Sign painters are the true heroes of lettering, for they make the alphabet and style fit the job. Printers and layout artists were constricted by metal and wood type; that is until photo lettering, then digital type opened up unexplored territories in design possibilities.

There is a unique charm (and nowadays pretty much a lost art) to hand-lettering word copy in a way that draws the eye like an arrow to a target. Even a simple sanserif such as Eckhardt Poster Text JNL can have the effect of that hand lettering when applied to posters and pages with plenty of white space and matching type designs of the period.