Hey all,

I'm new here. First post. I've been working in technical illustration and graphic design for over 40 years. Most of my focus has been technical illustration work though for the last 25 years, and not so much graphic design anymore, so my font identifying skills are very poor now (they use to be really good, LOL).

Anyway, over the last several years I have been dabbling (as a hobby) in bringing old 19th century religious art to life in a new way, and over the last year I have been using AI to create some really beautiful art. Presently, I need some help in identifying a very old font from the 1890's, or at least something comparable that's looks close. I am presently working on a piece that is a very old drawing from 1895, that came out of an old Catholic missal book. This art was done in Germany by a monk named Brother Max Schmalzl. His art went into missal books all over the world way back then, but now his art is very difficult to locate good clean copies (scans), but if I dig hard enough I can find some of his stuff. Anyway, I've worked on a number of his drawings, and these always include Latin text, and for awhile now, I've just resorted to using A Garamond as the font, but would really like to use a font that is closer to the font on the original drawings, so that is why I came here for suggestions.

Here is the piece I am working on now....I need to find a font that looks like the font used in the four corners of this artwork. It's a very compressed looking font, as it needs to be to be able to fit into this art. I would prefer a font that is free on Google Fonts or through the Adobe Creative Cloud fonts. Let me know what you all think...

Not a perfect match, but quite similar: Margrite

Given the age of your sample and the context, I wouldn’t assume that the original was a typeface—it was most likely lettering

Grifinito is another similar.

Thanks Kevin, I like Grifinito, but as I stated in the OP I was hoping to find a free font.

6 hours ago, Kevin Thompson said:

Given the age of your sample and the context, I wouldn’t assume that the original was a typeface—it was most likely lettering

I was wondering the same thing, but if you look at the a's and e's they all look exactly alike in proportion. I would think that would be really hard to pull off as hand-lettering, and just assumed it was a font. It was done in 1890's Germany though, so I knew it would be difficult to find.

The skill of lettering artists of that era (and beyond) might surprise you.

For a free option, try Imbue.

1 minute ago, Kevin Thompson said:

For a free option, try Imbue.

Thank you!