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
New Font: Vambrace
Back in March we held a poll to see which of five fonts we should put at the top of our development list and we ended up with three close contenders. Coming in third in that race was the design which we used as the basis for our new Vambrace font. Vambrace is basically a display and titling font which features a heavy outline style design. It’s very regular, but the characters are in a style which you might create with a Speedball style pen with a rounded nib for a poster or display card. The look is unusual and appealing and works well as a font.
You can download and try the demo version of Vambrace in TrueType format for Mac or PC. It includes a mix of characters from the different variants of the font. You can also order the full version online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.
Magnificent Texas Skies
One of the nice things about living in Central Texas is that we get some of the most magnificent skies I’ve ever seen. Unlike some parts of the country which have fairly consistent weather we’re on the border between two climate zones and we get all sorts of peculiar storms and impressive cloud formations and about the bluest skies you can imagine. For a photographer this offers some great opportunities, and in this case it’s a bounty which can be shared.
One of the easiest tricks to do in Photoshop, or a similar graphics program, is to take a photo with a drab sky and replace it with something more dramatic and impressive. Overcast conditions and clear blue skies produce uniform skyscapes which can easily be replaced and using a real image is a great improvement on using Photoshop’s rather sterile cloud generator filter. In fact, in most cases you can just click on the sky with the magic wand tool and select the whole thing. You can then take a more interesting sky image and paste it into that space and it looks absolutely natural. If you’re going to blow the picture up large you may want to go over the boundary between the sky and the ground with the blur tool on a low setting if the transition isn’t perfect, but in most cases this isn’t even necessary.
There are several benefits to improving your skies. Sometimes the thing you want to photograph isn’t going to wait around for a better overall picture with a nicer looking sky. A sky with stronger colors also provides a better contrast and a better backdrop for images. It can actually make your main subject stand out more and add drama to the overall picture. Of course, it can also distract if it overwhelms your main subject. But there are a lot of photos which can be seriously improved by the addition of a powerful and dramatic skyscape.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to take a series of great sky photos as the edges of a tropical storm came through the Austin area. The result is a collection of 12 unique and dramatic Texas skyscapes which I’m making available here for download for your photo projects. Put them to good use.
Poster: National Day of the American Cowboy
In a moment of pure serendipity I went down to our local feed store to get scratch for our chickens and discovered that they had changed their Sunday hours and I was out of luck, but stapled to the wall was the charming poster you can see to the right. Since the event was over, I couldn’t resist taking the poster and adding it to my collection.
It’s a poster promoting the National Day of the American Cowboy a nationwide event recognizing cowboy heritage, with associated events all over the country. It’s the seventh in a series of posters from the Hatch Show Print Company, many of which can be mailordered from Hatch for $15 each. It’s classic letterpress work, with all the quirks and character that entails, including a great cowboy woodcut and outstanding use of classic western style fonts . Of the past designs I think this is one of the best, though not as striking as the standout 2008 poster.
It’s a very appealing addition to my collection and I think it’s just a little bit better because I found it in its natural habitat rather than ordering it. It’s also inspiration to plunge on with my own letterpress printing projects.
Google Features Mucha Header
As you’ve probably noticed, Google’s main search page features new header images every couple of days. Sometimes they’re creative, clever or humorous and occasionally they feature the work of a particular artist. This weekend they popped up an image based on the designs of Art Nouveau legend Alphonse Mucha.
The graphic gives a good feel for Mucha’s art, but the attempt to make it into the word “google” really doesn’t work very well. It might have been smarter to use the Mucha art as a backdrop, particularly the image of “summer” from his triptych of the seasons, and combine it with one of our selection of Mucha fonts. Spelling out “google” with a font like Slava or Moravia might have worked better.
They also seem to have simplified and modified the image to reduce it to the size they use for their header images, losing a lot of the beautiful details you can see in the larger version of that image from our collection which is shown to the right. It’s one of Mucha’s prettiest pieces and in their simplified version they’ve made it almost cartoonish.
Nonetheless it’s nice to see Google recognizing Mucha so that we an opportunistically chime in with our observations and critiques.
Classic Font: Scurlock Updated
Scurlock was originally developed back in 2001 and has been one of our most popular fonts in the fantasy genre since that time. It has been particularly popular for the covers of fantasy novels, with its dramatic and stylized characters. One of the shortcomings of the original version of Scurlock was that it had a set of custom small-caps instead of a lowercase character set. As we’ve done with many of our updated releases of our older fonts, with this brand new edition of Scurlock one of the things we’ve done is to add an appealing set of lowercase characters which match the style of the striking upper case characters to make it a more complete font. We’ve also kept the original version, so now you can order Scurlock or Scurlock Lowercase or get both of them together in a set.
If you like the backdrop of the sample image to the right, it’s from our William Russell Flint art collection.
You can try the demo version of Scurlock for free, or order the full standard Scurlock online, or you can get the new Scurlock Lowercase or both together in the Scurlock family set.
Letterpress Printing I: Project Research
I have a commission to do an event poster for a festival coming up this fall. Rather than do the obvious and design it on the computer and then print it by any of the obvious high-tech methods, I thought I would look into what it would take to set up a homemade letterpress printing press and print the posters myself using relatively primitive technology similar to the methods used by poster printers like Hatch Press but on a more modest scale. I figured this process might be of interest to others so I’m writing it up.
My basic plan is to try to produce a press capable of printing in sizes up to 17x22in using inexpensive materials and basic carpentry and mechanical skills. The objective is to do this in a low-tech way with minimal cost and moderate quality with high volume and high speed not really priorities. I only need to print short runs of maybe 100 posters at a rate of maybe 10 copies an hour. What I need is the extra size which you can’t get cheaply for short runs by other methods and one of the goals is to keep the price competitive with silkscreening while using letterpress-style technology.
The first step was to do some basic research and the internet proved to be rich with resources. I clearly was far from the first person to have this idea and so I can benefit from the experiences of others. YouTube provided a number of excellent videos. Two of the best accompany this article. The first is a good overview of a small homemade press created very much using the kind of low cost and low tech methods I had in mind. The second is a DIY video on making your own polymer plates, which was very helpful in assessing whether that was an option I wanted to pursue. Also very useful was the letterpress community at briarpress.org which is a gathering place for letterpress fanatics and an excellent resource if you need advice, equipment, supplies or services. It’s got a large user base and though the site design is awkward the community is strong.
Now at this point I’m not even sure if the project is worth doing., but I’ve identified the two basic necessities. One is to build a press, which ought to be low cost and within my skills. The other is to produce usable plates for the press by some method which is both practical and inexpensive.
Given my past experience working with antique presses and my mechanical and woodworking skills I’m confident I can build a press. In fact I’m pretty sure that if sufficiently motivated I could build a mechanical press which used movable type and printed at a reasonable speed, though that’s way beyond my level of need or commitment for this project.
The bigger question is what do I print from? Movable type is right out unless I have some sort of windfall. Complete sets of the kinds of fonts I would want in wood or metal are prohibitively expensive and would take ages to find and acquire, and I’d still need to have custom pieces made for artwork and images. Worst of all I’d be stuck with the fonts I could find and wouldn’t be able to use any of my own designs. The alternative is to print from a single plate custom cut for the purpose. This can be done by hand. I could cut a whole plate myself in wood or rubber or linoleum if the job were simple and I had the time and patience, and I could do it from an original design which used my fonts, but it’s too much work if I want it to be of decent quality.
For speed, convenience and quality the third and most appealing option is to have a plate of some sort photoetched. Because of price and the fact that we don’t need the plate to last forever metal plates are out and the best option is a polymer plate. This is not something I’ve done before except on a very small scale, and my expectations (even after watching the accompanying video) is that doing the chemical etching myself to create a polymer plate is an iffy prospect. I’ve worked with photo silkscreening materials and had mixed and dubious results and I’m afraid the same concerns apply here. I’m still intrigued by the cost savings of doing it myself, but I lack confidence.
The easy alternative would be to spend some money and send a PDF of my design off to a professional platemaking company to be produced in polymer. This is a lot like the process for making a custom rubber address stamp but on a larger scale. The problem is that it’s not cheap. To be workable it needs to be around the same price it would cost to have the posters silkscreened and that means no more than a couple of hundred dollars, and even that is stretching the budget given the cost of paper, printing and the materials to make the press. Nonetheless this is the best combination of convenience and quality if the price is right.
In looking for sources the one which everyone seemed most pleased with was a company called Boxcar Press, but their prices were just too high. For the proposed 17×22 size their price was well over $200 just for the polymer plate and we’d be adding in another $25 or so for a film positive. More research turned up Elum which could do the plate for a tiny bit under $200. Really still too high, but getting into range. The final option was Nagraph which could get the price down a bit lower to about $170 including the cost of a film positive, with the apparent catch that the plate would come in several pieces – not really an issue since they would be reasonably large and easy to assemble. $170 wasn’t ideal, but it at least brought this option to within the realm of possibility, though it would mean a total production cost of perhaps as much as $3 per poster.
Thus far the accumulated research suggested that the project was at least feasible, but because of the cost it was necessary to go back and consider the question of whether I could successfully make my own polymer plate and save about $100 in the process. The next step was clearly to see if I could find materials either locally or online from a company like Boxcar Press and try making a polymer plate and see how painful the process was and what kind of quality I could produce. If I could do as well as the example in the DIY video I found on YouTube and with similarly low tech materials, then I’d be on my way.
Medieval Fonts and Art
Click any font to see a larger sample.                        |
he Middle Ages was a time when the art of writing really came into its own. The demands of church and government administration as well as the birth of popular literature created a huge demand for written documents. Decorative manuscripts began to become popular with a wider audience, courts and governments required more and more record keeping, and troubador ballads and the writings of authors like Chaucer and Boccaccio created a market for literature among the growing middle lcass. All of this required new and better forms of writing, styles which were readable, consistent, efficient to produce, and sometimes decorative as well.
ur Medieval Fonts and Art 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 (Froissart, Offenbach, Cadeaulx, Textura Quadrata, etc) as well as more unsuual and decorative styles (Aneirin, Magdeburg, Roncesvalles), illuminated initials from the period (Arberth, Jongeleur, Fraticelli, etc.), and some special extras like Monumental Gothic and Ardenwood which combine illuminated letters and full regular character sets. lso included is our extraordinary set of fonts based on medieval tile designs by Owen Jones. The package includes a total of 25 unique fonts.
The collection includes much more than just a fine selection of fonts. It also features a selection of borders, frames and other decorative elements based on medieval designs. These decorations include designs by Evelyn Paul and Owen Jones based on medieval source material and ready to use in your designs. They give you everything you need to make an illuminated document with a true medieval look.
ll the fonts in this package are historically accurate and they are not available from any other source. The package is available for Windows or the MacOS, and includes both TrueType and Postscript fonts. The total price is only $79 for all the fonts. You can order our Medieval font and art collection directly for delivery on CD by phone from 1-800-797-8973, or you can purchase the package online, just - CLICK HERE TO ORDER
If you like this package look for our new Arthurian Fonts & Art collection coming soon.
Roncesvalles is based on samples of medieval calligraphy. It features a traditioanl lower case character set with unique decorative capital letters featuring unusual flourishes. You can download and try out Roncesvalles 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
Image Samples:
New Font: Montgisard
There are certain design concepts which deserve more than one exploration. One of those is the combination of gothic elements with more more traditional Roman-style lettering. Classic font designer and calligrapher Rudolph Koch liked the idea as demonstrated in our Koch Gothic font. The idea of combining Roman capitals with a gothic lowercase is the basis of our new Montgisard font, which has a rough calligraphic look, unusual capitals with cruciform embellishments and a classic gothic lowercase. The result is interesting and unusual looking – excellent for titles and poster applications.
You can download and try the demo version of Montgisard in TrueType format for Mac or PC. It includes a mix of characters from the different variants of the font. You can also order the full version online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.
Russian Folkard Sees Print
We originally designed the Russian and Eastern European versions of our Folkard font for a special project which I’m still not cleared to talk about, but we did get to release them some months ago for general sale, and much to my surprise I was in my local Russian deli, and there on one of their shelves of Russian knicknacks was a childrens book with the Cyrillic version of Folkard on the cover.
I couldn’t track down an English language version of Vasny so I have no idea what the book is about, but it does seem to feature a monkey, and that’s always a plus. Yet it’s a sure thing that if good taste in fonts reflects good taste in literature it must be one truly excellent read. Plus if it introduces international youth to some of our fonts, that has to be a good thing.
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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.
