Classic Font: Skull and Bones


In honor of Halloween our featured classic font for this month is the playful yet Macabre font Skull and Bones.

As you might suspect from the name, the characters in this font are made up of combinations of skulls and bones, including leg bones and gruesome articulated spines, as well as some merry little stylized skulls. It’s rather like a visit to an ancient roman catacomb with an ossuary. All just perfect for your Halloween designs.

You can download and try the demo version of Skull and Bones. The full Skull and Bones font is available from our ordering site.



Rating 3.00 out of 5

October 27, 2008 | Filed Under Classic Fonts | Leave a Comment 

New Font – Crane Gothic

One of the artists whose works we’ve been acquiring actively in the last couple of years is influential arts and crafts era illustrator, author and designer Walter Crane. Crane’s childrens books, illustrated classics and collections of Shakespearean woodcuts are outstanding examples of the best of work of the artist as craftsman and are characterized by both technical skill and a unique retrospective vision which typefies the best of the late 19th century Arts and Crafts movement.

Although not as recognized today or as great a critical success, in many ways Crane outshines even the great William Morris. While his written works are not as highly regarded as Morris’ poems and novels and he never made the same kind of mark in interior design (though his wallpaper designs are arguably much more inventive than any of Morris’ work), Crane’s artistic and literary output was enormous, and his success in taking the arts and crafts style into the commericical mass market was remarkable. Crane had the attention to detail which is the mark of the true craftsman. He wrote, designed, illustrated and often hand lettered his books and even had a hand in the printing, binding and publishing in many cases. Crane made it his goal to produce remarkable illustrated works for children at a price which the common man could afford. He was also active as an art teacher throughout his career, mentored many students and left behind a number of very informative texts on art and design.

We’ve been working on fonts from small samples of his lettering to include in the Walter Crane package we have in development and it’s been a challenge because most of the samples we’ve had to work from are limited and require a lot of extrapolation. Then, much to our surprise, a parallel project of acquiring books by noted paleographer Lewis Day turned up a Day book with a couple of full sample alphabets hand lettered by Crane. It was a real breakthrough for the project, giving us a nucleus of the font collection which will eventually be in the package.

The first of our Walter Crane fonts is Crane Gothic, based on lettering which offers a unique and original interpretation of late gothic inscribed lettering characteristic of 16th century monumental brasses and stone carvings. It has a full character set with capitals and small caps, plus numbers and punctuation. You can download and try out the free demo version of Crane Gothic (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.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

October 23, 2008 | Filed Under Featured Fonts, Fonts, Gallery, New Fonts | 5 Comments 

Review: Compositor

In my ongoing quest for a low priced and powerful alternative to Photoshop I recently stumbled on an interesting graphic design package called Compositor from Artly There Software. The name Compositor is a reference to the process of photo compositing where images are combined together to create a new composite image, as in blue or green screening in movies. You can certainly do photo compositing on a small scale in Photoshop and Compositor expands on that capability with the addition of some of the basic functions you’d have in a full-featured compositing application.

At base, Compositor is a fairly functional low-priced alternative to Photoshop which is surprisingly reminiscent of one of the best earlier releases of Photoshop, release 3.0 which was my favorite version of the popular graphic design application for many years and which I kept on using well past its normal product life. I think I used Photoshop 3.0 for almost a decade, up until the release of Photoshop CS and the incompatibility of OSX with older Mac applications. However, Compositor also offers a number of unique features and additional capabilities building off of that classic graphic design base.

The menu structure and the range of features in Compositor are pretty close to what was available in Photoshop 3.0, including the lack of easily accessible layers features (which I always found an asset rather than a liability) and relatively clunky mechanics for changing image shape and orientation. The graphics formats which it can handle are somewhat limited, but include most of the basics, plus the ability to save files as Photoshop PSDs and as Adobe PDFs. True to its name it also has the ability to export sequences of images as Quicktime movies, giving it animation capabilities which even newer versions of Photoshop don’t have. Compositor has some very nice color features, with enhanced color picking tools and can handle different types of color palette, including CMYK. It also has an excellent brush pallette with lots of options.

Perhaps the most significant difference from any version of Photoshop is that it comes with a very large selection of ‘filters’ and ‘actions’ which function in place of the plug-ins in Photoshop. It would be nice if it were also compatible with some of the excellent third party plug-ins which are produced for Photoshop, but the designers have done their best to cover as many bases as they possibly can. Many of these tools are oriented towards animation and video special effects. Some of them are very cool and work very well. Others, even some which are essential standards are weak. The ability to extrude, emboss and highlight text is rudimentary, so if you use it to produce an animated movie your titles may not look as snappy as you’d like.

Ultimately, Compositor offers both more and less than Photoshop at the same time. The simpler design with the basic functions you need in a graphics program may be appealing to those who want to do basic quick and dirty image editing, but when it comes to more sophisticated graphics work it may become frustrating and prove to be inadequate. Yet it also offers some very useful capabilities for animation which I find intriguing and plan to play around with some more. I’d hardly call it a full featured video compositor, but it does have some useful capabilities and is approachable for a novice.

The capabilities of the demo version are somewhat limited, but with a price of only $33 for the fuil version Compositor is worth considering if you need a Photoshop alternative which can also do some video work.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

October 16, 2008 | Filed Under Review | 6 Comments 

Ladies of Grace Adieu by Sussana Clarke

Sussana Clarke developed a unique alternative version of 19th century England with a touch of faerie and magic in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and continues that setting with a collection of charming short stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu. The sheer length of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and the Dickensian style in which it is written makes it quite an intimidating read. It’s worth the effort, but it’s a major undertaking. Ladies of Grace Adieu is a much better introduction to that world, because the short stories are more approachable than the mammoth novel.

Each story is a little gem of classic folktale storytelling. Some are adaptations of traditional fairy stories with touches of the mythology unique to Clarke’s world. Others are entirely original, but cleverly written to fit with the style of the rest, reminiscent of the work of classic Victorian mythologers like Joseph Jacobs or Andrew Lang.

Just as their books were improved by the work of illustrators like H. J. Ford and J. D. Batten, Clarke’s book is enhanced by the addition of decorative frontispieces for each story by classic contemporary fantasy artist Charles Vess, whose pen and ink drawings and lettering capture the feel of those great 19th century fairy books. The title story is particularly good, but all of the stories stand up well on their own merits. Each one is a little different, but partaking of a common background they fit together well. If you like the work of writers like Neil Gaiman or Charles de Lint (both of whom have also worked with Charles Vess), you’re going to like Susanna Clarke, and this book is a great introduction to her work.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

October 14, 2008 | Filed Under Review | 1 Comment 


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