chances are if you are working with any kind of 2d design, especially paper goods or web design you will be using typography. two trends popular at the moment are for decorative circus or western fonts, and also for hand drawn type. ive put together some lovely examples here, starting above with this bold artwork from jeff canham and below with this card from sweetpea ink the traditional imagery looks contemporary thanks to the font.

letterpress cards like those above from hello lucky and below from 9spotmonk are the perfect medium for decorative fonts. to capture the right mood for these fonts you need to think circus like, ornate and showy, or western playbills and cowboys.

once in the hands of susie and heidi bauer at rock scissor paper this vintage typeface below becomes fresh and contemporary, from their wild words card range.

many designers are taking decorative fonts into their own hands and either handrawing existing ones, or creating their own. the brilliant michelle romo (below left) from crowded teeth is spending the entire month of january creating typography here at her 25 project. below right, holly wales created this fab felt pen font in her ‘october’ illustration.

above, tim biskup has created this unique font on his website below, two books on the subject that come highly recommend, right is ‘new vintage type‘ by steven heller and gail anderson, left is the fabulous ‘hand job - a catalog of type‘ by michael perry.

finally here’s a quick and easy way to get your hands on some copyright free decorative fonts. published by dover ‘24 circus dispaly fonts‘ comes with a cd that loads instantly onto your pc.