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Classic Font: Valdemar
Halloween is coming up in a month and it seemed appropriate to make our featured classic font for this week fit with that theme, and with its enormous popularity Valdemar seems like the perfect choice.Valdemar started as a set of embellished uppercase characters with bits of clockwork and odd design motifs worked into the character forms to give them a unique, archaic look. Eventually we developed two companion fonts, one a version with a lowercase character set and the other a set of alternative uppercase characters. The set also includes small-caps and foreign language characters.
Valdemar has been very popular for book designs, movies and merchandising. It was selected as the official title font for merchandised products for the Harry Potter movies, but the similarity between the name Valdemar and the character Lord Voldemort is coincidental. The name Valdemar actually comes from a story by Edgar Allan Poe and the font was released before the movies came out.
You can download and try the demo version of Valdemar. The full Valdemar family set is available from our ordering site.
Sighting: Platthand in Dr. Parnassus
It probably doesn’t mean that it will play a role in the film itself, but it was interesting to spot our Platthand font being used in the title graphic on the website for former Monty Python Terry Gilliam’s new film The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.
Dr. Parnassus is a fantasy film set in a circus and is the last feature film made by the late Heath Ledger. The release date hasn’t been set, but there is a kind of ‘making of’ style teaser/trailer and the folm looks pretty interesting.
Roman Inscriptory Fonts
Exploring his favorite historical period, Michael Scarpitti has developed a special collection of fonts based on Roman inscriptory lettering and calligraphy. You may have already seen a few of his fonts on our featured fonts page. While more Roman fonts are planned for the future, with the latest releases we now have enough fonts to release them as a package at a special price.
What we think of as Roman Capitals (the type found on the Trajan column) are really rather rare. Much more common was the Rustica, a less formal, rather free flowing sort of letter that was easier to write. Sometimes inscriptions would include both styles. Vespasiano features both types of lettering. It comes from an inscription dated May 24, AD 70. It was found intact in 1914 at Rome, in the Viale Trastevere, at a construction site, and bears the name of the emperor Vespasian who ruled from AD 69 to 79. 
De Bellis is based on the sole surviving fragment of a lost Latin work, de Bellis Macedonicis, and is the first of Michael Scarpitti ancient Roman fonts to come from a parchment. The sample it is based on is the only surviving example of Roman Literary Cursive, which has elements of both rustica and uncial lettering. The date is uncertain, but probably 2nd-4th centuries AD. The original sample was written with a reed pen held at about a 35 degree angle.
Michael’s Roman fonts are based on historical sources from different eras of the Roman Empire and are extraordinarily accurate to the details of the different lettering styles which they represent. These are not modernized abstractions of popular styles like Rustica and Roman Uncial, but grittier, more interesting designs derived directly from ancient manuscripts and inscriptions. This is Roman lettering as it was actually done, not a contemporary designer’s reinterpretation.
Corbei Uncial is a calligraphic font based on lettering in the 5th century Latin gospel manuscript known as the Codex Corbiensis. It features some of the characteristics of more familiar uncial forms of the early middle ages, but also retains elements of earlier Latin lettering styles. One interesting feature is the broken nature of many of the letter forms, which are composed of multiple distinct, separate pen strokes.
Praitor is based on a devotional inscription to the goddess Diana found a short distance from Rome in 1887. It is an early style from before 100 BC and has some characteristics of Etruscan lettering. It’s a rough, strong font which works very well for distinctive titles.
Pomponianus is based on lettering from Roman inscriptions. Pomponianus comes from a 4th century inscription found in North Africa. It is an attractive example of early uncial lettering. Uncial inscriptions are quite uncommon, because although the style was well suited for writing on vellum, the curved letters made it more difficult to carve in stone. 
Roman lettering styles have a unique and ageless look which still appeals to the modern eye. The complete collection of Michael’s 8 Roman fonts is available for only $59. It can be delivered by mail or immediate download with an online purchase To order online just CLICK HERE to order online.You can get a feel for these fonts by trying out the demo version of Falconis in zip archive format and usable on Windows or Mac OSX.
New Font - Waldeck
Waldeck is a gothic font based on 17th century German calligraphy. It has elaborate, decorative uppercase characters and stylish but fairly simple lowercase characters, plus some unique features, including custom decorative descending flourishes for several of the characters. It’s a nice change from some of our recent releases. Ultimately it will probably end up in a future expansion for our popular Gothic Fonts collection. Download and try out the free demo version of Waldeck (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
Futuristic Fonts
Click to see larger sample. 
It’s not easy to define what the future of font design will be, but we can certainly identify fonts which look like something from what we imagine the future to be. Fonts with a high-tech, mechanical look are always considered futuristic, and there are certain styles which have come to be associated with science fiction and other futuristic themes. Strangely, we’ve come to associate Arts and Crafts fonts, or fonts which derive from that tradition more strongly than any others with the look of the future. Fonts like Semiramis, Sanhedrin and Alecto which are one step removed from traditional Arts and Crafts design fit right in with the futuristic theme. Some other classic fonts are also obvious picks, especially those which come from futuristic design movements like constructivism, the source for our Structura font. And of course, you can’t go wrong throwing some technological imagery in with appropriate lettering, as you see in Circuit and Gearhead. Putting all these together we get a nice melange with what we tend to imagine as the look of the future.
Several of the fonts are fairly new releases or seldom seen fonts, brought in specially for this package. Alecto is a new original design, and Circuit and Gearhead have not been available for general distribution until now. You haven’t seen them before and you won’t find them in any of our other packages.
The Futuristic Fonts collection is available for only $49. It comes for either Windows or MacOS computers and includes both Postscript and TrueType fonts. You can order it easily online from our ONLINE STORE
To get an idea of what our futuristic fonts are like, try out the demo version of Alecto. It doesn’t have all of the punctuation and variant characters, but should give you a good feel for the font. Click here to download Alecto in an archive which will work with Windows or Mac OSX.
Designers: GIMP is Not the Answer
Just as I did a while ago with Desktop Publishing programs, I’ve started a search for a low-priced or freeware alternative to Photoshop with which both Mac and Windows users can do effective graphic design work without having to pay an outrageous price. By my calculation, if you bought Photoshop and kept it up to date over the course of the last three years you would have paid well over $1000 not including the additional hundreds of dollars to get essential state of the art plugins. Not every graphic designer works for a huge advertising or prepress company and that kind of expense is something most of us would have to think twice about. Photoshop is a great program, but as I discovered when I went looking for cheap programs to replace to InDesign and Quark, there are viable alternatives available at a reasonable price. Sadly, after considerable testing, I have had to conclude that despite promising qualities, GIMP (downloadable from www.gimp.org) is not one of them.GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation System, and it was originally designed to be part of the GNU package of free, opensource software applications to go with the GNU operating system. For wider dissemination it has also been made available for Windows and for any Unix operating system, including Linux and Mac OSX. That’s a very cool, techie kind of origin which gives one the feeling that you’re using a kind of insurgent software designed to challenge “The Man” who takes the form of Adobe in the DTP world. Plus it’s free and various people have hacked modifications for it, and it comes with a lot of plugins and the potential for considerable expansion.
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Classic Font - Orpheus
Several years ago we saw a crying need for a font which had the general look and feel of the horrifyingly popular font Morpheus but wasn’t so freakishly awkward looking, poorly weighted and just plain unattractive. People were looking for the font, but it’s a freeware font with all the problems that brings with it, and none of the major font distributors were carrying it. So we set out to design a font with a similar look from scratch, which combined the stroke weight of a classic calligraphic text font with character forms which are reminiscent of traditional Celtic uncial. The idea was to make a font which looked a bit like Morpheus, but with more attractive, more consistent character forms and which was rendered cleanly and properly spaced and kerned? The result is Orpheus, a font which has the general look and feel of Morpheus, but is a much more complete and fully realized design. Morpheus has been very popular despite its shortcomings, but it’s been so overexposed designers should really avoid it. Orpheus offers the option of using a new and different font while still getting the same kind of mystical, magical look while not actually using Morpheus. In addition, Orpheus is a fully developed font set, with not only regular and bold versions, but with a special customized italic style, an alternate character set and a really neat looking heavy weight rough-outlined variant. You can download and try the demo version of Orpheus. The full Orpheus family set is available from our ordering site.
Art Fonts
Art fonts (sometimes called “dingbats”) have their origins in early printers ornaments or artistic marginalia used to fill space on a page and break up large blocks of type. Traditionally these ornaments took the form of floral or geometric designs, and were inserted when the page was set, just like letter type.
With current technology art fonts are able to reproduce more complex images so they can also draw on the tradition of artists marginalia and other simple illustrations designed to accompany text. Marginalia perform a similar function to printers ornaments, but are usually more specialized and more characteristic of the work of a particular illustrator or the theme of the book in which they originate.
Traditionally most art fonts are fairly primitive, drawing on mostly functional themes, such as international sign symbols or recreating antique printers ornaments. But the medium of digital type is capable of much more, and we try to explore some of those possibilities with our art fonts. They go beyond the primitive concept of the “dingbat” and provide a more sophisticated range of small, versatile illustrations which will enhance
documents very effectively.
In exploring the potential of art fonts we owe a great debt to Arthur Rackham and some of the other artists who liberally decorated their books with marginal figures and scenes which are visually striking, yet simple enough to work well as characters in a typeface. Rackham was involved in every aspect of the production of many of the books on which he worked, and his role went well beyond the normal scope of the illustrator. He did so much decorative work on his books that we have 6 different fonts based on his marginalia. 
We also have many of historically based art fonts, drawn from ancient images and decorative arts, including Roman tiles, Native American pottery painting and medieal heraldry, plus a selection of humorous and whimsical silhouettes.
All of our art fonts are available in both True Type and Postscript format for Macintosh and Windows computers. They can be purchased individually or in a special CD collection with more than 25 of our art fonts for $69.00.
Our
single fonts and art font packages can be ordered online, by mail or by phone for delivery online or by mail. To order the complete art fonts package online go to our ONLINE STORE.We’ve got a free sample art font for you to try out. It features selected characters from some of our most popular art fonts and you can download it for free. Click here to download the WINDOWS version which will also work on Macs running OSX.
New Font - Stampwork
Something old. Something new. We’ve done a lot of fonts lately based on antique type and lettering, so here’s something brand new, a font designed to look like the output of a rubber stamp. It’s in the tradition of our Draughtwork and Roughwork fonts, with a sort of technical look. Stampwork has two versions of the uppercase character set. One set features over and underline artifacts like those produced by the edge of a rubber stamp which is pressed down too hard. The other set is plain. There are also alternative line artifact characters to add variation.
Download and try out the free demo version of Stampwork (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
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Waldeck Font **NEW**
Waldeck is a gothic font based on 17th century German calligraphy. It has elaborate, decorative uppercase characters and stylish but fairly simple lowercase characters, plus some unique features, including custom decorative descending flourishes for several of the characters. It's a nice change from some of our recent releases. Ultimately it will probably end up in a future expansion for our popular Gothic Fonts collection. Download and try out the free demo version of Waldeck (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
Stampwork Font
We've done a lot of fonts lately based on antique type and lettering, so here's something brand new, a font designed to look like the output of a rubber stamp. It's in the tradition of our Draughtwork and Roughwork fonts, with a sort of technical look. Stampwork has two versions of the uppercase character set. One set features over and underline artifacts like those produced by the edge of a rubber stamp which is pressed down too hard. The other set is plain. There are also alternative line artifact characters to add variation. Download and try out the free demo version of Stampwork (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
Woburn Initials Font
It's been quite a while since we did an initials font, so here is Woburn, a lovely set of floriate initials based on an early woodblock design which uses late gothic characters and adds nice, clean floral embellishments. As a bonus we've added a full lowercase character set in a compatible style. It also works well in combination with our classic Cymbeline font. Woburn will be added to the next release of our Decorative Initials collection. Download and try out the free demo version of Malvern (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
Malvern Font
Malvern is a new Celtic-style font with upper case letters which are an attractive variant on insular minuscule lettering but with a unique lowercase character set which is stylistically compatible but not really part of the Celtic tradition. It fits well with the style of the fonts from our Celtic Fantasy collection, which it will probably eventually be added to. The uppercase characters are somewhat similar to our classic Durrow font, but with some additional flourishes. Download and try out the free demo version of Malvern (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
Orford Font
Orford is based on samples of hand lettering from a 1693 manuscript collected by Lewis Day in his classic book on historical paleography, Alphabets Old and New. It is stylistically similar to our Allegheny font, but cleaner and clearer. It has characteristic clubbed ascenders on many of the lowercase letters, and alternate versions of a large selection of characters. It's an excellent example of colonial period calligraphy and works quite well as a font. It will eventually be incorporated in an updated release of our Colonial Fonts package. Download and try out the free demo version of Orford (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site. -
Tangle Font
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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Valentin Font
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 Valentin is available on our Ordering Site. -
Posada Font
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. 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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Broadley Font
Yorkshire-born architect and designer C. F. A. Voysey was one of the preeminent figures of the later period of the Arts and Crafts movement. He was England's answer to his more famous American contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright. Voysey's designs were ambitious and comprehensive and included not only basic architecture, but also interior design, decoration and furniture. Voysey's work was reminiscent of the design work of William Morris. He is particularly remembered for his unique fabric and wallpaper designs which echo the work of Walter Crane. His houses featured white rough rendered walls with horizontal ribbon windows and huge pitched roofs, and are recognized for their simplicity, originality and total abandonment of historical tradition. Voysey did detailed plans and elevations of all of his houses, and labelled them in a unique hand lettered style which we have preserved and turned into a new font called Broadley. The font was developed from lettering samples on several of his plans and includes features typical of arts and crafts period lettering such as nesting and joining characters. It has a very special period look and will ultimately be included in our Arts and Crafts font collection. You can try out the free demo version of Broadley for either MacOS or Windows. The full font of Broadley is available on our Ordering Site.
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Aventine Font
It's a very political year so we're releasing a political poster font, Aventine. From time to time we've been asked to work on some political designs for local campaigns. One offshoot of that is that we have developed some poster font designs specifically tailored to the needs of campaign posters, and as we did with Texas Star back in 2002, we're making one of those designs available in our general catalog. Aventine is a very clean, very bold, modern-looking font. It's designed to look like the kind of sans serif fonts you see on political posters all the time, but with a few twists which may be hard to notice by themselves, but which add up to just a tiny bit more of an art deco look than you'd normally expect in a straightforward poster font. If you wonder where the name comes from, it was inspired by the excellent HBO series Rome where, in the final season, the main character entered into a political career with his power base as a captain in the merchant district of Rome called The Aventine. You can try out the free demo version of Aventine for either MacOS or Windows. The full font is available on our Ordering Site. -
Groningen Font
Groningen is a modern looking font inspired by the Bauhaus design period and some of the elements of industrial design from the 1970s. It features rounded, symmetrical, somewhat mechanical looking characters with a bold weighting which is ideal for title or poster uses. Groningen includes two fonts, the basic character set with some alternate forms and a second 'degenerated' version of the font with two alternative versions of each character in different states of corruption and deformity. Groningen and Groningen Degenerated are available individually or as part of a set. Eventually they will be included in our Modern Fonts collection You can try out the free demo version of Groningen for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined set of Groningen is available on our Ordering Site.
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More Fonts
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