Thu Jul 03, 2008
New Font - Tangle
Tangle is a fun font drawn by hand to have the look of twining vines, reminiscent of a grape arbor in the winter. The inspiration is from my front gate which is twined with an endless tangle of mustang grape vines. It was designed on a whim, but turned out pretty well. It has a full upper and lower case character set, plus numbers and punctuation and special characters. Maybe some clever vintner will notice it and put it to use on a wine label.
You can try out the free demo version of Tangle for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the upper case characters. The full version of Tangle is available on our Ordering Site.
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Sighting - Joan of Arc Brie
There's nothing more exciting than going down to the supermarket and finding a product right there on the shelf featuring one of our fonts. Even better if it's a product that the family likes to consume and I can bring it home and show it to the wife and kids and point to the font as one I designed or had a role in developing.
Earlier this week, while on vacation, I was sent down to the local store to get some Brie for family snacks. Although the selection was limited, my eye was caught by the attractive package of Joan of Arc Brie and especially by the prominent use of our Ganelon font on the cover of the small round of the cheese.
The cheese eaters among us were happy to declare the brie to be quite palatable, so I'm glad to report that it tastes as good as it looks with Ganelon as it's signature font. And in fact, the makers of Joan of Arc have expanded their use of the font to include a full line of other cheeses under that imprint as well. If you want to try the font, you can get it right here. If you want to try the cheese, the only online source I found is on Amazon.com
New Font - Valentin
Valentin is an Art Nouveau font with an eccentric, stylized look. It has the same fixed-weight characteristics as Ganelon and Gaheris, but the character forms are dramatically different. It's clean and clear and very readable, very much the kind of lettering you'd have seen on 1920s vaudeville playbills.
The graphic with the letter sample to the right isn't part of the font, but seemed to fit stylistically. It's a bit of decorative marginalia from a book illustrated by Clara Peck which is just full of Arthurian theme illustrations and decorative motifs which are going to be included in our forthcoming Arthurian Fonts and Art package.
You can try out the free demo version of Valentin for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Posada is available on our Ordering Site.
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Psychedelic Artist Alton Kelley, 1940-2008
Last week legendary psychedelic poster artist Alton Kelley passed away. Kelley was best known for defining the unique styles of the album covers and posters of the Grateful Dead and Journey. He was one of the best known of the artists to come out of the San Francisco scene of the 1960s who got their start designing posters for concerts at the Fillmore. His style was distinctive, and while he may not have been as diverse and productive as his contemporary Rick Griffin, his designs for the Grateful Dead were probably the very best known of the era. His skeleton with roses motif, which draws on the designs of Edmund Dulac, is probably the single most recognized graphic design theme to come out of the psychedelic era.
Like the other poster artists of the psychedelic period, Kelley drew on font designs from the Art Nouveau period for inspiration. A number of psychedelic poster fonts derive from hand drawn styles used by Kelley and his contemporaries. Particularly characteristic of Kelley's style are the Pantagruel, Bad Acid and Hendrix fonts. Kelley's illustrative work was also influenced by artists from the Art Nouveau period, particularly poster designer Alphons Mucha. Kelley's work was a continuation and augmentation of the genius of earlier eras and artists, and his work will live on as part of the legacy of one of the most interesting American movements in the design arts.
There are a number of good, profusely illustrated books on the psychedelic poster art period available on Amazon
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[0] Add/View Comments (320 views) | [0] Trackbacks [0] PingbacksClassic Font: Beynkales from the Corpse Bride
Here's a classic font with a strange backstory. You may recall that a while ago we discovered that Tim Burton was using an outdated version of one of our fonts for the interior titles in his upcoming (Fall '05) release The Corpse Bride. Well, our quest to get hold of him didn't bear any immediate fruit, but in a totally unrelated event we were contacted by the graphic arts company working with the overseas distributors for The Corpse Bride and it turned out that they needed a font based on the main title of the movie so they could keep the same style when they retitled it into other languages. The original title was either hand lettered or a heavily modified font, bearing some resemblance to our Ligeia and Tuscarora fonts, so we had to create a whole font more or less from scratch and extrapolate most of the letters from the very limited sample in the original title by identifying certain consistent characteristics and building new characters around them. It was a lot of work, but the good news is that they didn't want exclusivity, so we've got the font to add to our collection. We ended up calling it Beynkales which means 'Bone Bride' in Yiddish, which makes sense given the context of the movie.
You can try out the free demo version of Beynkales for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Beynkales and Beynkales Alternate is available on our Ordering Site.
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New Font - Posada
José Guadalupe Posada was a Mexican printer, engraver, cartoonist and illustrator of the late 19th and early 20th century who was enormously influential on the development of Mexican Folk art styles which continue today. Posada is best known for his Calavera cartoons and illustrations which satirized his fellow Mexicans as skeletons in the tradition of Dia de los Muertos. Many of Posada's cartoons were published as single-sheet handbills and included original hand-lettered captions and titles in a style reminiscent of period newspaper headlines.
We've previously collected many of Posada's Calavera lithographs in our Macabre Fonts and Art Collection and now we're releasing our first font based on Posada's lettering, somewhat unimaginatively tagged with his name. It's a rough and bold all-caps character set with alternative caps on the lower case keys, with an offset positioning which Posada used in a number of his cartoons, as demonstrated in the sample to the right. Stylistically the Posada font probably falls into the category of 'circus' fonts like our h Plowright font. We'll probably do more fonts based on Posada lettering in the future and perhaps on lettering from other historic Mexican sources like bullfight posters, working towards the eventual release of an entire 'south-of-the-border' themed package.
You can try out the free demo version of Posada for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Posada is available on our Ordering Site.
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