Folkard: The World of Warcraft Font

For several years World of Warcraft has been the dominant multiplayer online computer game on the market. It is moving into a new era this week with the release of Wrath of the Lich King an expansion which opens up more realms and new opportunities to players, adding to the depth and variety of the world to keep players involved and enrich the playing experience for the large and still growing community of players.

One of the things which has made World of Warcraft so remarkably successful is the graphically rich environment and excellent artwork which bring the game world to life. This rich look and feel carries over to the software interface, the packaging and their online resources and website. One important element of that graphic presentation is their choice of fonts, and I’m very pleased to note that our popular Folkard. font is central to their designs. In fact, Folkard has become so closely identified with World of Warcraft that we are now actually getting customers coming to us looking for it specifically as “the World of Warcraft font” rather than by name.

If you visit the World of Warcraft website you’ll encounter Folkard almost immediately, in use for all of the decorative section headers and titles as shown in some of the screen samples accompanying this article. It’s also used for the names on the different character class emblems in the Talent Index, for sections in the FAQ and for sections in other areas of the website. When you launch the game you’ll also find it on launch screens and options screens and just about everywhere else. It’s inescapable.

Folkard is a great font choice for a fantasy game because it is the essence of classical fantasy. It is based on hand lettering done by Charles Folkard in the early 1900s for a collection of fairy stories from Scandinavia. It was developed into a font by Dave Nalle in 1993, some years before it was discovered and used in World of Warcraft. Charles Folkard is best known today for his classic illustrations for Pinnochio, but most of his work was in illustrating classic myths and legends from different cultures, with each book including unique hand lettering for the titles and picture captions. This particular style of lettering was also popular with other fantasy artists, but Folkard’s variation with the combination of celtic-style lowercase letters and swashed capital letters is particularly striking, which is why we made a font of it and why Blizzard chose it to use in World of Warcraft.

Folkard is available for purchase as a single font from our online store or you can get it as part of our Fantasy Fonts and Art package, which also includes other fonts and selected fantasy-theme art by Folkard and other artists.


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4 Responses to “Folkard: The World of Warcraft Font”

  1. Scott Hunter on November 17th, 2008

    A great font. The makers of BuckCraft chose well.

    I`ll have to grab it sometime, but my VISA monster is far too powerful right now…

  2. Elizabeth Burton on November 17th, 2008

    Uh, guys? That should be “tolled,” not “told.” ;-)

    Neat font, though. All your fonts are; I’ve used several now for book layouts.

  3. Dave Nalle on November 17th, 2008

    Elizabeth, you’ll have to take that one up with Billy the Bard.

    You can see the entire text of MSND at MIT. Check Thesus’ final speech at the end of the play:

    The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve:
    Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.
    I fear we shall out-sleep the coming morn
    As much as we this night have overwatch’d.
    This palpable-gross play hath well beguiled
    The heavy gait of night. Sweet friends, to bed.
    A fortnight hold we this solemnity,
    In nightly revels and new jollity.

    Dave

  4. World of WarCraft Font : Thumb Gods on December 18th, 2008

    [...] friend in the pblishing world tipped me off to this article about Folkard: The World of Warcraft Font. Not being a typesetter myself, I’d never given the WoW font much thought, but it is pretty [...]

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