Mashup Type Foundry
Found fonts. We make fonts from old typewriters and old technical documents.
Each font is built from scans of real marks on real paper: letters struck by a typewriter, or typed and lettered into manuals, datasheets and reports decades ago. Nothing is drawn. The uneven ink, the worn edges and the slightly wandering baseline come along, so text set in these fonts looks like it was actually typed.
Where the letters come from
- Typewriters. IBM Selectrics, Olympias, Royals, Smith-Coronas: whatever still types. We type a sheet with every character on it, several times over, scan it at 1200 dpi and build each letter from its real strikes.
- Technical documents. Old Tektronix and Heathkit manuals, speaker spec sheets, NASA and military reports: all typed or lettered by hand, often with a Leroy lettering set. We scan them, then lift and rebuild the letters from the page.
Every font gets its own name and is made only from our own scans, never from another font file. All of them are free.
Mashup Pica
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@\_`¢°±·×÷–—‘’“”•′″−¼½¾⅛⅜⅝⅞
The first font. It comes from my own IBM Selectric, the golfball typewriter, typing with an IBM Prestige Pica 72 element at ten characters to the inch. Each letter is the best of several strikes, faint ones included. Symbols the element doesn't have, like fractions and the times sign, are pieced together from real strikes rather than drawn. Underlined text uses three different real underscore strikes in rotation, so no two underlines look alike.
The Mashup Sound manual, on paper and at mashupsound.com, is set in it. Free for any use, personal or commercial.
Download Mashup Pica (.zip)Mashup Drafting
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG. C12 .01µF 50V
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789& ( ) * + , - . / : ; = µ
Capitals only, like the drawings: lowercase types as capitals. The ampersand is the lettering template's own.
Hand lettering from the schematic drawings in a 1977 Tektronix manual, the Type 611 Storage Display. A draftsman lettered every part number and value on those fold-out sheets, most likely with a Leroy lettering template. We scanned the drawings at 600 dpi and lifted each letter from the page: thousands of samples, and the cleanest of each is in the font. Colon, semicolon and equals are pieced together from real strokes, and the µ is the draftsman's own, from every µF on the drawings. The Z is crossed, the way draftsmen told it from a 2; a stylistic alternate gives a plain Z.
Tektronix allows its manuals for discontinued measuring instruments to be copied.
Mashup Sterling
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789!"#$%&'()*,-./:;?@\_¢·¼½–—‘’“”′″
From a Smith-Corona Sterling Cartridge, an electric typebar portable with the Coronamatic ribbon cartridge. Typed at ten characters to the inch and scanned at 1200 dpi. Every character was typed three to eight times, and each letter in the font is all of its strikes lined up and averaged: the machine's own type, not one inking of it. The exclamation mark is an apostrophe typed over a period, the way a typist made one on a machine without the key.
This machine strikes its capitals lighter than its lowercase, so some caps are broken, like the top of the Z and the left side of the W. That is the machine's character, and it stays in the font. Free for any use, personal or commercial.
Download Mashup Sterling (.zip)