Art Deco Font Collection
Our new Art Deco font collection includes a remarkable selectiion of fonts from the design movements of the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the kinds of fonts which were generally associated with the decorative arts movement which developed out of the Arts and Crafts movement. More...Wild West Fonts
Our Wild West font collection features 14 fonts based on designs from the classic days of the American West (1870-1890). They are typical of the type and lettering styles used in signs, circulars, posters and newspapers during that era. The selection includes both decorative, display and text fonts. All the fonts are historically accurate and they are not available from any other source. While they are basically fonts of the Victorian era, they represent a subset of the typefaces popular in that period particularly slanted to the environmnet of the wild west, frontier newspapers and wild west shows.More...Pre-Raphaelite Collection
The art of the Pre-Raphaelites recreated classical and legendary themes, fascination with architectural elements and realistic drapery, and the use of models who fit a particular style and appearance, usually with thick, curly hair and voluptuous figures. Our Pre-Raphaelite collection features select images from the most prominent artists of the movement in high-resolution suitable for use in print.More...The Baby’s Opera Collection
Or latest collection based on one of Walter Crane's childrens book is our comprehensive presentation of The Baby’s Opera, Crane's compilation of childrens songs (including music and lyrics) with detailed illustrations, hand lettering and clever decorations on every page. Many of the designs and motifs can easily be extracted for use in your own designs. More...Text Fonts Collection
You've got to have text fonts, so wny not make them interesting and unique rather than the same old boring set that come with every computer. Our Text Fonts Collection has more variety and more style than you'll find anywhere else. More...Howard Pyle Fonts and Art
Howard Pyle was one of the most renowned illustrators of the 19th century. His work was widely published in adventure novels, magazines and romances. He was the founder of the Brandywine school and artists colony in Chadd's Ford Pennsylvania, where he taught artists like N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover and Thornton Oakley their craft. Our Pyle collection includes a large selection of Pyle's art and designs plus original fonts based on his hand lettering. More...Medieval Fonts and Art
In the Middle Ages the demand for written documents required new and better forms of writing, styles which were readable, consistent, efficient to produce, and sometimes decorative as well. This package features a selection of fonts and art based on designs from the Middle Ages, emphasizing the years from 1100 to 1400. The 25 fonts include versions of the major popular lettering styles of this period and the art includes beautiful borders, frames and other decorative elements based on medieval designs. DETAILSThe Lady of Shalott
Howard Pyle’s illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott is probably the single greatest expression of book design in the American arts and crafts movement of the late 19th century. This early Pyle work combines his vivid illustrative style with exceptional decoration and lettering into a modern illuminated masterpiece. Our Lady of Shalott CD package has every page from the book in high resolution format, including the decorated verses, the full-page illustrations and the embellished titles and flyleaves. It also includes extracted and instantly usable versions of the initials, illustrations background patterns, borders and frames from the book. DETAILSArt Nouveau Collection
This collection brings together all of our best fonts based on Art Nouveau period designs into an extensive collection, with over 30 unique fonts, including text, title faces and even decorative initials. This includes new fonts created just for this package plus classics in the Art Nouveau tradition. It also features a bonus collection of frames and borders based on designs from magazines and books of the period. Altogether it makes the ultimate resource for Art Nouveau style design. DETAILS2009 Sampler
About once a year we release a special sampler package with a collection of selected fonts and art from our most recent and forthcoming packages, including some unique items not available anywhere else, all brought together as an overview of what we've been up to at the Scriptorium during the past year at a special, extremely low price. This latest sampler has four complete new fonts, 15 demo fonts and a special selection of art and graphics which includes a special set of illustrations of Celtic mythology by Katherine Cameron. DETAILSViking Fonts and Art
This collection presents calligraphy and art based on the traditions of historic Germanic cultures. It draws on the broad scope of early Germanic design, from the pre-Christian era through the early middle ages, including not just Scandinavia, but other elements of Germanic culture from the Franks to the Saxons to the Normans and beyond. The main component is a collection of historic fonts which is complemented by a unique set of historic borders and motifs, plus art based on Viking myth and legend. DETAILS.Gothic Fonts
A collection of our best fonts based on gothic type and late medieval calligraphy. It covers the range from the historical styles in which gothic printing had its inspiration to the ornate heights of complex gothic fonts from 19th century Germany. This includes fonts in the style sometimes called 'Old English', as well as what calligraphers sometimes call 'Black Letter'. If you like your fonts dark, angular and complex, this is your dream collection. DETAILS
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.
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.
Textures and Patterns in Web Design
One of the best ways to give a website color and character is through the effective use of textures and patterns. Rather than just relying on flat color, by mixing color with the variety of textures and patterns you can catch the eyes of viewers and make your graphics really riveting.
What is a texture and what is a pattern? At the most basic level, a texture is any kind of graphic which depicts a multi-toned image which is not necessarily representational of anything more than the variations in surface color of some sort of object. In design terms a pattern is a texture or a graphic which can be repeated endlessly as tiles whose sides match up to make a continuous pattern. You can align multiple pattern tiles and create a larger continuous pattern. Textures are most useful for giving images depth and variation. Patterns have the added functionality of being able to be smaller and more compact and still lend their character to a graphic of any size. Both can be used in effectively in designing graphics, but patterns also have other uses, including creating fast-loading backgrounds for web pages (see the forthcoming article on this topic).
There are lots of ways you can use textures and patterns in graphic design, but let’s focus on how they can help in web graphics. The most common uses of graphics on the web are titles and link buttons of some kind. While these can be made interesting with color and with tricks like offsets and beveling, large expanses of unbroken color, reliance on simple colors, and repetition of standard graphic techniques tends to produce graphics which don’t grab the eye, and creates an overall impression of crudity. The use of textures can add essential variety to your graphics which give your web page a more sophisticated characteristic look and feel.
In designing web titles, you generally want to make the titles bold so that they stand out from their background. In addition to using contrasting colors or an offset, this can be done by replacing basic color with the greater depth and visual appeal of a texture or pattern. The graphic to the left is a good example of the combination of these techniques. While it uses beveling and offsets, the main characteristic of the title is the wood-floor pattern which is the basis of its unique appearance.
The technique for adding a texture to a title is fairly simple. You start by picking a font and typing out the title. Generally bolder and wider fonts work better for this. We recommend ultra thick fonts like DROMON, CULDROSE, FABLIAUX, or STONECROSS. Using your preferred graphics program (we recommend Photoshop), you start out by typing your title in a dark color on a neutral background. Make sure you use a background which will drop out nicely to the background color of your page. Next, select just the text of the title, using either the magic wand or color selection feature.
Go and find the texture of your choice. Either copy this texture, or define it as a pattern. Then return to your original title graphic and either paste it into the selected space, or use the fill feature to fill that space (fills are usually used with patterns, rather than textures). The result will be the title with the pattern you chose instead of its original color. At this point you have your basic textured title.
Once you have your basic title, you may want to play around with it a bit to make the texture stand out more. One simple way to do this is to just increase the contrast of the image, heightening the variations in the texture, as seen to the left.
Another useful technique is to increase depth, using a tool like KPT Convolver which extrudes light or dark elements of the texture to increase variation. This is similar to increasing contrast, but can produce a more striking result, as shown in the example to the right. Any of these variations is more interesting than a basic title, and you can enhance them further with the application of other techniques. Unless you want to have a colored background which contrasts with your page background, your next step is to convert the image to a transparent GIF by reducing the number of colors and saving it as a GIF, selecting the background color as transparent, producing something like the example to the left.
Buttons are another essential of web design which can benefit from the use of textures. Because buttons usually end up in a very small size, we recommend working in a larger size and then reducing your button to the size you need. Let’s say we want to create a little, round ‘radio’ style button. Start out with a circle of black on a neutral background. The constrast makes it easy to select the button area or the area around the button.
Next, select a texture to fill the button with, like the one to the right. Fill the circle with the texture as explained above for titles.
Because they are so small, buttons need to have some added depth. If it isn’t dramatic it won’t show up when the button is reduced to the kind of small size buttons are usually wanted in. This can be done using a beveling tool (Extensis PhotoBevel works great with Photoshop), as in the example to the left, or using a simple manual beveling technique, as in the example to the right.
To do a simple bevel like this, just select a portion of the interior of the circle, and either lighten or darken it to contrast with the outer part of the button.
Alternatively, you can fill it with a second texture, as with the lower example to the left. You can also combine these techniques for a more complex effect, or do things like adding contrast or depth as discussed above for titles. If you’re going to end up shrinking your button to a very small size extensive texturing may be wasted effort, as much of the detail is likely to get lost after the image is reduced.
Finally, shrink the button to the size you want, and you get something like the image to the right. Dimensions around 16×16 pixels usually work pretty well for buttons. Sometimes the impact of textures on a very small button is fairly subtle, but the larger the graphic the more essential depth and variety become.
You knew the pitch had to come. The key thing to doing all of this is having a nice selection of patterns and textures. We’re ready to provide them. You can get the complete Scriptorium textures and patterns collection for only $79, with hundreds of graphics, including a wide variety of mineral, wood, metallic and artistic textures and patterns. To order go to our ONLINE STORE. If you want to try some out first, download our free texture sampler to get started.
We’re doing a special focus on textures and patterns this month, first with this revision of one of our classic articles and with a brand new article on tiling backgrounds in a few days-DN
New Font – Woburn Initials
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. Woburn is big and decorative, but the characters are very clear and clean.
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 included as one of the new fonts in the next release of our Decorative Initials collection.
Download and try out the free demo version of Woburn (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.
New Font – Malvern
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.
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New Font: BigBlok
A great many years ago when working in game publishing I had a real fascination with doing titles in a strong, super-bold font called Bolt Bold. The truth is I rather overused it. In doing some research I find it on more than a dozen different game books I wrote in the early 80s, all quite collectable and out of print today.
