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
Font Club Exclusive – Art Deco Borders Font
Once a year members of the Font Club get a bonus font which is an exclusive release only available to Font Club members with their membership. Past Font Club exclusives include Peck Initials, Galloys and Peck Shields.
As the Font Club enters a new year, we’re releasing a brand new exclusive font for members. Those who have ongoing subscriptions will be getting to download the new Art Deco Borders font along with their newest regular font club font. New members will get it along with their first new font download when their membership starts. And of course, new members also get a new font roughly twice a month for a total of 26 new fonts as they are released. Even if our new releases fall a bit behind, you’re still guaranteed a full 26 fonts plus the bonus font.
Memberships end up costing less than $3 per font, plus if you sign up for two years you’ll get another bonus font halfway through your membership and the cost per font ends up being less than $2. It’s a very hard deal to beat. Memberships are only $79 for one year and $129 for two. To sign up, just go to: JOIN or try a TWO YEAR MEMBERSHIP.
Font Revision: Pontifica New
Pontifica New is an entirely new version of Michael Scarpitti’s Pontifica font which we originally released back in 1999. Despite its popularity, Michael wasn’t satisfied with his original design and wanted to redo the font to be a more accurate representation of the samples of early gothic lettering on which it was based. He redid all of the outlines from the source manuscripts from the Papal Archive and the spacing and kerning was also adjusted to reflect the appearance of the lettering on the manuscript page.
Pontifics is an example of protogothic calligraphy, a style developed at the monestery of St. Gall in the 12th century to replace Carolingian minuscule with a more efficient and compact system of lettering. Ultimately it became the progenitor of the gothic lettering styles of the late Medieval period. In addition to the standard character set, we also offer the
You can try the demo version for free, or order the full version online or get it with Pontifica Swash in a special set.
James Blaylock – The Ebb Tide
James Blaylock has not been a prolific author in recent years, but with the release of Knights of the Cornerstone earlier this year, followed by the recent release of The Ebb Tide a new Langdon St. Ives short novel, he’s doing his best to make up for lost time.
Blaylock is the progenitor of the Steampunk movement in literature and his series of Langdon St. Ives stories are one of his most notable contributions to the genre. The Ebb Tide is a new novel which takes off where his short story collection The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives ended. It’s not terribly long at a scant 132 pages, but it’s very nicely produced, with a cover and illustrations by J. K. Potter, from specialty-press publisher Subterranean Press. Perhaps the best thing about the design of the book is that the titles are done in our Goodfellow font, which can be found in our Steampunk collection.
As for the story itself, St. Ives and his sidekick Jack Owlesby discover an underground shipyard beneath London and take a voyage by submarine into a nightmare realm beneath the sea and confront a villain named Dr. Frosticus. It’s not the easiest read in the world, but it’s certainly an interesting read, and the Steampunk ideas come thick and fast in a heady mixture of Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s a book worth reading and it’s good to see Blaylock back on the job and perhaps ready to bring us more unique steampunk stories in the future.
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.
The package is available for Windows or the MacOS, and includes both TrueType and Postscript fonts. It’s available for only $59 for all the fonts. You can order our Wild West fonts directly for delivery on CD or online from 1-800-797-8973, or you can purchase the package online. Just CLICK HERE TO ORDER
Plowright is a new font based on hand lettering from the 1880s. It’s a great example of the style we often associate with signmaking in the old west, with a lot of quirks and original character. Plowright is the first of a family of related fonts, and is also part of our soon to be released Wild West Fonts package. Click here to download the working trial version of Plowright for either WINDOWS or MacOS. Or you can purchase this font online and get it quickly by email, including all the alternate and additional characters – BUY IT NOW
New Font: Changeling
As we mentioned in a recent article on Projects in Development, we’ve been working on some fonts based on lettering by Fanny Railton. It took a bit longer than expected, but the first of those is done, a new font called Changeling based on her caption lettering from her illustrated edition of Midsummer Nights Dream.
Changeling has two complete sets of variant uppercase characters plus additional variants of a number of key characters. It’s stylistically reminiscent of Howard Pyle’s caption lettering in the Brandywine font with the same kind of arts and crafty hand-penned look.
You can download and try the demo version of Changeling in TrueType format for Mac or PC. The full version of the font is available if you want to BUY IT NOW.
Not Entirely Clear on the Concept
While standing in line at the grocery store the other day I happened to notice a Michael Jackson fan magazine from the publishers of Black Men magazine. It was notable because it featured our font designs prety prominently, and even more so for using one of them so remarkably incompetently.
The back cover had a nice title done in Butterfield, but on the front cover and two of the interior poster spreads they decided to do Michael Jackson’s name in Ardenwood. That’s great, but ther’s a problem. They set the whole name in the upper case character set, as demonstrated in the first example in the graphic to the left. The result is not visually pleasing.
Ardenwood was designed with the intention that you would use a combination of the unadorned lower case characters with the adorned upper case characters. As you can see, just using the upper case creates a horrible mess, with flourishes overlapping and obscuring each other and generally looking crowded and poorly thought out. The second and third examples show a couple of ways that Ardenwood could have been used which integrate the upper and lower character sets much better and produce a visually more appealing result without all the mess.
Picky, I know, but it bugs me. Michael Jackson may have lived a life of excess, but using excessive decorative characters when setting his name is too much of a good thing.
Classic Font: Delaguerra
Back in 2001 we were approached by the Santa Barbara Historical Society to develop a new font based on a style of lettering used on inscriptions on a number of historical buildings in downtown Santa Barbara. The result was the Delaguerra font which we named after the street where the historical society and many of the historic buildings are located. The font is now in use in historic markers and certificates in the city, but since they didn’t need an exclusive design, we also have it available as a single font or in our Arts and Crafts collection.
Delaguerra is a classic example of “mission style” arts and crafts design characteristic of California in the early part of the 20th century. We have several other fonts in the same tradition like
You can try the demo version for free, or order the full version online.
Using Flash Fonts on the Web
I wrote recently about the set of Web Fonts we had designed a few years ago. As noted in that article one of the major shortcomings of that solution to web typesetting is that the end user has to have the fonts installed on his sysem for it to work. Giving the fonts away for free is an awkward answer to that problem, because it requires the user to come to the site, download the fonts, install them and then return to see it properly. Just not practical at all.
Another solution which comes closer to being satisfactory is to use fonts which take advantage of Flash technology and use what’s called Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) which replaces the text on your page with text in a specified font in the Shockwave Flash (SWF) format. All this requires is that you convert the fonts you want to use to SWF format or download fonts in that format and install them where your site can access them and then have a plugin or Java script installed to handle the Flash implementation. You can also convert TTF fonts which you already have using an online tool called sIFR Generator. Or using the Flash developer software if you have it.
Obviously this method requires a lot more work in developing your website, but it really does produce a result which is seamless for the end user. For a Java script with instructions on how to make it work with SWF fonts, try the jquery script. I can provide a lot more guidance and experience for those using WordPress, where the implementation is made much easier with the WP-SIFR plugin which you install in your WordPress plugins folder. It includes a folder to put your SWF fonts in. You can then select which fonts to use and assign them to an otherwise unused text format variable in your CSS for your site like h1 or h2 or h3. Then, whenever you use that variable to define a text style, voila that text will show up in the SWF font you’ve assigned to it.
For example, I have h3 set to display text as the Barataria font at 14px
and h4 set to display text in the Agravain font at 18px.
There are some caveats.
In my opinion Flash fonts look a little bit blurry in small sizes, so if you want to use them for text I recommend testing a number of them to see which ones look good at small sizes. I do think that some of our web fonts work pretty well for Flash text as do some other fonts specifically designed for the web.
There are also some other challenges. Not all formatting works quite right with Flash fonts. As you can see I haven’t got the line spacing working as it should with these samples, which seems like it may be a problem in the conversion process. There are also a limited number of variables which will be free to use for fonts. Perhaps most importantly if you put a lot of text in Flash format it loads significantly more slowly.
As a general recommendation, I’d use Flash fonts sparingly and primarily for titles or decorative purposes. I haven’t yet committed to using them on any of my sites, including this one, though I think that plugging the right font into the titles is worth considering.
Not a perfect solution or one I’ve entirely mastered yet, but something worth playing with, anyway.
Pre-Raphaelite Art Collection
The Pre-Raphaelite movement emerged in the mid-1800s as an attempt to return art to its traditional styles and themes. While the Pre-Raphaelites did draw stylistically on Renaissance models, the movement soon developed its own unique style and philosophy, producing art which was traditional, yet uniquely new. An artistic Renaissance for its time.
The most prominent Pre-Raphaelites were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Edward Burne Jones, John Everett Millais and Lord Leighton. The movement also became closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement which arose in the same period, largely linked together by the collaborations of Arts & Crafts designer William Morris and Edward Burne Jones.
The style of the Pre-Raphaelites was characterized by an interest in 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. The end result was a style which was realistic, yet fantastical, and ultimately had a strong influence on artists throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially illustrators like William Russell Flint and Eleanor Brickdale.
Our Pre-Raphaelite collection features selected images from the most prominent artists of the movement in high-resolution suitable for use in print. It includes some of the most well-recognized paintings like Millais’ The Knight Errant and Ophelia, Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, Hunt’s Triumph of the Innocents and Burne-Jones portrait of Sidonia von Bork. This collection is unique, because the originals to these paintings are controlled by galleries which will not allow them to be reproduced. Our versions are taken from antique prints which they don’t control, so we can license you the right to use them within some simple limitations. As with all of our collections, the images are licensed to you for reprint or inclusion in other publications so long as you are not primarily reselling just the art itself.
Our new Pre-Raphaelite package is temporarily available at a special reduced price of $39. It’s also available in dicounted combination with our Morris package for $79. Both are best ordered on CD unless you have a very high speed internet connection. The high resolution of the art makes the collection take up a lot of disk space, which makes it ideal for distribution on CD.
The easiest way to get this package is to order it online. To order online, just CLICK HERE . Or for the combo with the Morris package just go to: COMBO. For info on the Morris package click on the image to the right. It’s also easy to order with our toll-free number at 1-800-797-8973.
If you like the Pre-Raphaelites you might also like the art of Eleanor Brickdale and Sir William Russell Flint. Just click here to check out their pages: FLINT – BRICKDALE
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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.
