A New Tool Font

Carl Shank • November 6, 2023

A New Tool Font. CARE Typography is pleased to announce a new pictogram font, the HandTools Font. This is a font for Macs, Windows and Linux machines crafted in the Open Type (otf) format. While there are many illustrations of hand tools available for image uploads, this font provides some of the more basic hand tools used by a carpenter or construction crew. My father was a finish carpenter and used probably all of these tools at one time or another. The font is black on white and can be used in ads, flyers, articles, news clippings, and so forth. The fact that it is a font allows the user the flexibility to use the font in large sizes, as well as regular text sizes, without losing sharpness of detail.


The HandTools font is available for purchase on this website, either as a single font, or it can be combined with other recently crafted pictogram fonts by CARE Typography. We hope you will like the font!

Successful Layout & Design

Faust Lettering

By Carl Shank • July 11, 2025
Charles Ayers Faust (b. 1860) was an American calligrapher and typographic designer known primarily for his 1912 compendium Faust’s 75 New Alphabets , a richly illustrated manual of lettering techniques. Published in Chicago by the C. W. Braithewait Company, this 72‑page volume is now in the public domain. CARE Typography, in its mission to digitally restore older typography, has restored some of Faust's designs for the modern type world. 75 unique alphabets for artistic lettering, including brush, air-brush, air-pencil, relief, stencil, marking, shading, and both ornate (Payzant, Soennecken) and practical “common pen” styles. They are Highly visual, serving as both an instructional guide and inspirational specimen book for sign-writers, designers, artists, and printers of the early 20th century.  Samples are below, available from CARE Typography .

Typography and Religion in the De Stijl Movement

By Carl Shank • July 8, 2025
The De Stijl (Dutch for “The Style”) typographical and art movement emerged around 1917 and significantly influenced modern art, design and thought itself. In the wake of the chaos of World War I, the movement sought to express a new vision of harmony and order. De Stijl was not just an art style, but a comprehensive aesthetic philosophy. It sought universal beauty, as abstracted from individual beauty, and a visual language and typography based on simplicity, geometry and primary colors, namely red, blue and yellow. Its core characteristics were the use of straight horizonal and vertical lines, the use of rectangles and squares, an emphasis on asymmetry, and the favoring of pure abstraction. De Stijl was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Neo-Plasticism, a theory developed by Piet Mondrian, which sought to depict reality in a pure, universal form. Behind this philosophy was the religious thrust of Theosophy, particularly the spiritual writings of Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) and Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925).
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