New Font: Plymouth

As you may have noticed we’ve been doing fonts off and on for several years based on the hand lettering of early 20th century sign-painter Frank Atkinson. Past fonts based on his lettering include Atkinson Eccenteric, Atkinson Boomtown and Atkinson Egyptian – all striking examples of period lettering which are memorable and useful. Now we add to that collection our new Atkinson Plymouth.

Plymouth is reminiscent of the very popular Cooper font which originates in that same period of the 1920s. Yet Atkinson’s take on the idea of a very bold font with rounded serifs is unique and quite a bit more attractive than Cooper, preserving more of the look of a traditional serif font and avoiding much of the “balloony” character of Cooper which is too exaggerated and unattractively soft looking. Plymouth is just as bold, but it’s sharper and cleaner and has more character. In developing our Plymouth font we’ve preserved some of the quirks of the hand lettered version, while cleaning up the outlines and regularizing character shapes and sizes. The result is a very appealing bold poster font and a great substitute for Cooper.

You can download and try the demo version of Plymouth, in TrueType format for Mac or PC. You can also order the full version of Plymouth online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 30, 2010 | Filed Under Featured Fonts, Fonts, Gallery, New Fonts | 1 Comment 

Our Recent Run-In with Google

As some of you may have noticed, this site was shut down for 2 days last week, along with a variety of sites we host on this same server for local charities and friends. This happened as a result of a short line of code inserted in a comment to a post on the Typesmith.com site which is a mirror of this site in a different presentation format. The comment was from a spammer and the code it included was a redirect to another site which is accused of hosting Malware.

Very bad stuff. We don’t want anyone going to any of our sites and getting involuntarily redirected or being exposed to malware in any way. Google also doesn’t like it, and they responded by effectively blacklisting our site, which caused all of the visitors for about 48 hours to receive this ominous malware warning instead of being able to access this site or any others we host:


That’s a pretty alarming message to see in your browser. Possibly more alarming for us than it was for any customers who came to the site during that period. But on reflection what seems most alarming about this is the fact that Google has somehow acquired the power to do this.

Put aside the fact that our page was not hosing any actual malware, just a redirect to a site which Google had already interdicted and which was ultimately shut down by its ISP for spamming and distributing malware, so no one redirected would ever have actually been effected. Put aside the fact that Google blocked our entire server, not just the offending site itself. What is really troubling about this is that Google has put itself in a position to essentially be the policeman of the internet entirely on its own authority. Through deals with browser manufacturers they have been given this ability to shut down websites – effectively entire businesses – with no legal authority, no oversight, no accountability and no legally recognized process of appeal, adjudication or remedy. Google just decides there’s a problem with your site and they shut it down. My elected representatives in Congress didn’t give them this authority. The FCC didn’t give them this authority. They just took it.

There are good things about the “wild west” character of the largely unregulated internet, but the ability of a single powerful company to shut down websites like this is not one of them. Google’s influential search engine already makes them enormously powerful. That it has given them the leverage to set up this internet policing system is truly disturbing. Big Brother turns out not to be the government, but to be a well intentioned internet business with too much power and no constraints on its actions.

We would never knowingly host malware or a redirect to a questionable site, and we appreciate anyone who will help us keep our site clean and safe. Had Google just sent us a warning email the potential problem we would have fixed it as a top priority. But their unilateral actions and their practice of interdicting our whole server rather than warning us directly made it look very much like we were the source of the malware and that all of our sites were infected, when in reality neither was the case. No one was ever exposed to the redirect in question and since the site it referenced – the proper target for any action – was already shut down there was never any real risk to anyone.

On the web you live and die by the reputation of your company. We’ve been working for years to establsh a reputation as a stable and trustworthy supplier of the very specialized fonts and graphic arts products we deal in. We would never want that reputation tarnished by being involved in distributing malware, but we also don’t much appreciate it being tarnished by the actions of Google which we never asked to provide this service and which has never been given the power to regulate the internet by any legitimate authority. Though hard to estimate exactly, the damage done by their actions has to be substantial. Every time they drove away one of the thousands of users turned away in this period who may never return to the site, Google did us direct and irreparable harm.

Of course, we immediately followed through on Google’s suggestions for how to address this problem. We found and removed the offending line of code. We installed clean and updated versions of WordPress on our various pages. We changed our admin passwords. We protected key directories from any kind of outside access. We even took several pages offline completely in the short term just to be safe. Then we requestd a “reconsideration” of our situation from Google. We did all that within a couple of hours and it still took Google almost two days to remove us from their blacklist.

All of this could have been avoided if they had just sent us a simple warning email. This is the first time we’ve ever had a problem in 15 years online, and as a company which is not involved in scams or distributing questionable software we deserve to be treated better. It’s important to protect consumers, but it’s also important to give people a chance to solve their problems voluntarily and not treat everyone like criminals when your malware bot flags them. it’s not like they don’t know how to get hold of us. We’re signed up for their site analytics, so they have our email. Had they just contacted us we would have fixed the problem. They would have helped us and our customers out and built good will all around. They’d be heroes. But instead, their arrogant and dictatorial approach to this problem has made them villains as much as the authors of the original malware — moreso as that malware did no real harm despite its potential, while Google knowingly and unnecessarily harmed an innocent party, because we were the actual target of the exploitative script.

So take this as a warning. Make sure your websites are kept clean and that any web software you’re running is up to date. Reduce your vulnerability to exploitative scripts as much as you can, because that is your responsibility if you run a website. But be warned. If you ever have a problem like we did, there are mindless malware bots out there and Google has given itself the power to shut you down and ruin your reputation because they’re big enough to do it and no one is willing to challenge them.

And, of course, we apologize for any inconvenience this caused any of our customers, both on our own behalf and on behalf of Google, because they don’t have to apologize to anyone.

Dave

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 30, 2010 | Filed Under Articles | 1 Comment 

Russian Folk Art and Fonts Collection

In the early 20th century, before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the Art Nouveau movement crept into the failing empire by way of Alphons Mucha and the Slavic Folk Art movement in Czechoslovakia. Russian artists picked up on the ideas of these movements and began producing new styles of art for a growing commercial marketplace, combining elements of traditional Russian decorative arts, subjects from Russian folklore, and ideas from the west.

The leading star of the Russian Folk Art movement was Ivan Bilibin, whose illustrations of Russian folk stories and fiction by contemporary authors like Pushkin were remarkable for their integration of traditional and modern styles. Other artists were also attracted to the movement, including many who went on to achieve fame in more respectable artistic circles, such as Leon Bakst. Many of these artists did advertising art as well as illustration, and a lot of their work was featured in the magazine World of Art, which was the showplace of the movement. Like other folk artists of the period, the work of Bilibin and his contemporaries extended beyond the limits of simple illustration, including graphic design and fascinating hand lettering styles.

The Scriptorium’s Russian Folk Art Collection includes a selection of illustrations and decorations by Ivan Bilibin and other artists, including decorative borders, emblems, headers and large-size illustrations of Russian folklore. It also features three special fonts based on the lettering of Russian artists, including Ivan Bilibin and Mikhail Vrubel, as well as a recently added set of 10 Russian language fonts. The whole collection is only $49. To order your own Russian Folk Art collection remember the stock number (AT107) and give us a call at 1-800-797-8973, or visit our online ordering page — ONLINE ORDERING

If you want to try out one of our Russian Folk Art fonts, just download the demo version of Bilibin using the link below. The full version is in the Russian Folk Art collection.



Download the Bilibin font for Windows or MacOS

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 25, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Walter Crane’s Queen Summer

In our ongoing development of our extensive Walter Crane library, we continue to do digital adaptations of his most notable books. The latest of these is Queen Summer, or the Tourney of the Lilly and the Rose, an epic poem written and extensively illustrated by Crane in a charming neoclassical style. The work is reminiscent of some of Crane’s masques and dramas written for performance by the Arts and Crafts Guild, some of which are on the list to be added to our collection.

For now we’re making the full set of pages from Queen Summer available as a special mini-package at the low price of $29. It includes all the lettered and illustrated pages as high resolution graphics suitable for design projects plus a full PDF copy of the book itself. Eventually the whole thing will be included in the Walter Crane super package, including two fonts we’re developing from Crane’s lettering in the book. But for now you can get Queen Summer by itself from our online store.


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September 22, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Classic Font: Hadrianus

Hadrianus was developed in 2001 as an addition to our Master Fonts selection of high-end text fonts. It was created to fill the need for a very formal Roman-style font derived from historic Latin lettering. It’s one of our most attractive and readable fonts and includes an expanded character set with foreign language and special characters. It’s also available in a variety of custom weights and styles, including italic, bold, extra-bold and ultra-bold. Hadrianus is particularly elegant while still being highly readable and great for display uses or for the main text in a book or other publication.

You can try the demo version of Hadrianus for free, or order the full Hadrianus set online with the complete expanded character set and the various custom weights and styles.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 17, 2010 | Filed Under Classic Fonts, Fonts, Gallery, Text Fonts | Leave a Comment 

Licensing Fonts for Embedding

While most of our business remains selling fonts for use in publication and graphic design, a growing market for stylish fonts is in the production of sophisticated digital applications for computers and increasingly for other platforms like console games and even smartphones. Fonts for use in these applications are usually embedded, either as part of a Flash animation or application or in bitmap format in the code of the program. This allows the program to access the fonts to make any custom text required by the program without ever installing the font on the end user’s computer.

Embedding means that the font is resident in the program rather than in the user’s operating system, so it’s available to anyone who buys the product but they can only use it with that product and not for any other purpose. Commercially it’s a concept which is somewhere between a traditional font purchase by a single end user and a business licensing a font for redistribution to multiple users as an enhancement to a product. We keep our single font prices very reasonable when selling to consumers and we charge competitive prices for multiuser and redistribution licenses — though those package deals for the resale of tens of thousands of fonts can add up to a fairly high total.

Embedding is different, because the ways that the multiple copies of the font can be used are strictly limited, so we’ve decided to price fonts for embedding pretty reasonably. There are some pricing variables dependent on the sophistication of the application and the particular font chosen, but embedding one of our top tier fonts in an application for a hand held device like an iPhone is typically less than $300 and we offer discounts for older fonts and for packages of multiple fonts purchased together. Prices to embed a font in an application for a more advanced platform are slightly higher. We also do custom modifications and custom foreign language adaptations for many fonts for embedding.

As interest in embedded fonts has grown, certain fonts which are on the line between text and title fonts have been particularly popular. Standouts among them include Folkard, Scurlock, Buccaneer and Windlass.

If you have a project for which you need to license a font to embed, our selection is large enough to fill any requirement.  Browse through our fonts and feel free to contact us directly for a price quote.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 17, 2010 | Filed Under Articles | Leave a Comment 

Textures and Patterns

One of the first areas we branched out into after starting out exclusively with fonts, was an early package of interesting textures and background patterns. These were graphic resources we originally designed for use in various print projects – some of them pretty peculiar – which we thought were potentially useful to other designers for their projects. The problem we ran into almost immediatly was that very few designers realized how valuable and flexible texture designs can be outside of a few very limited and familiar applications, like wallpapers. As a result our texture collections have never really been hot sellers and we’ve let them languish in obscurity. We hope this new page will help educate and inform to bring about a full realization of the extraordinary value of textures in all areas of design.

What on earth is a texture? Basically, a texture is a graphic which doesn’t necessarily represent a particular scene or object, but rather preserves the specific look of an area of surface on an object, or a particular space within an image which has an identifiable distinct appearance, such as a group of clouds, the bark of a tree, the surface of a stone, etc. Textures can be very complex or very simple, and you can find them all over virtually any image, but you rarely notice them because you see the compisite image, not the variety of textures and texture variations which make up the image, in combination with other elements such as outlines and shading. You can see a wide variety of our textures sampled on this page, both presented flat and demonstrated as textures on curved surfaces with lighting effects.

For the designer and artist there are many uses for textures. Digital animators use textures all the time in helping to make their spaces and objects look more real. If you look at any environmental game or animated movie you will notice how textures have been used to give walls and floors, objects and backgrounds a feeling of reality. The thing which makes a door look like wood and not metal, or makes a ball look like leather and not plastic is probably a texture. What many designers seem not to realize is that with the internet and printing technology available today textures can be valuable in many areas of design where you might not expect them. Textures have great potential in web design and in areas of print design which are traditionally fairly static. Many of the best designers already realize the value of the subtle use of texture. Look closely at the areas of color you see in print ads or on the web. Sometimes those aren’t colors, but are actually subtle textures used in place of a flat color to engage the eye and make a page look more interesting.

On the web the most common use of textures is in providing backgrounds or wallpapers for a web page. While many design guides recommend against doing this, out of
concern for inexperienced users, they rob you of one of the most powerful tools for giving your web page a distinctive appearance. While it’s true that overly complex and colorful backgrounds can distract and confuse readers, subtle use of appropriate textures which are designed to work well with text will help keep readers attention and make the theme of your page more pervasive. Try to avoid textures which have dark shades (unless you use light colored text) and lots of contrast. Textures like our paper textures work particularly well. You may also want to fade the texture you use for your background by using a 20-60% white or light colored fill, keeping in mind the threshold at which the fill overwhelmes the texture and creates an ugly white blur.

There are basically two important types of textures. A ‘spot’ texture is one which has a unique and distinctive pattern, but is not intended to be used as wallpaper and is not designed to form a continuous uninterrupted pattern when used as a tile. A ‘pattern’ texture is one which is designed to be used as a style and is made in such a way that when multiple blocks of the texture are laid out next to each other they form a a continuous, non-interrupted pattern so that you cannot tell where one tile ends and the next begins. Pattern textures are not necessarily the same as traditional pattern tiles, since they are designed to look like a continuous texture when tiled, not like a series of more complicated interconnected forms. Spot textures are usually used in artistic design to add depth and complexity to elements of an image. Pattern textures are mostly used in graphic design for forming backgrounds and wallpaper type effects, either in print or on the web. All of our texture packages include a mix of both kinds of textures, and in many cases both spot and pattern versions of the same texture design. We’ve used pattern textures extensively for the backgrounds on our web pages, particularly textures from our paper and fabrics collections.

The Scriptorium Texture Collection contains hundreds of original texture and pattern designs organized thematically. It is an enormously valuable resource for any digital artist or
graphic designer. Many of the textures in the collection were developed in the course of projects on which we were working,
from game designs to book covers, to original art projects, to web pages. The thematic sub-collections can be purchased
individually, or they can all be purchased together as a group on a single complete textures CD. The sub-collections include
wood textures, stone and mineral textures, fabric textures, paper textures, metallic textures, animal skin textures, sky and sea textures, artistic textures and more. Each of the smaller collections is only $18 and the complete textures set is regularly $99, but currently sale priced at $79. To order individual packages or the complete collection just go to – TEXTURES ORDERING Or you can call us at 1-800-797-8973

The texture packages shown in the samples on this page are (from top to bottom) – Skin Textures, Stone Textures, Wood Grain Textures, Artistic Textures, Paper Textures, Fabric Textures.

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September 16, 2010 | Filed Under Art Collections, Collections | Leave a Comment 

New Font: Montressor

My hip collegian daughter is always pushing me to make fonts which she thinks will fit the design trends of the day, which seems to come down to fonts which would look good in the monogram on the side of the Adams Family’s hearse, on an Ed Hardy t-shirt or tattooed on the back of a contestant on Tool Academy. Ok, that’s the extent of my second-hand contemporary cultural literacy.

But she has a point that we work with all of these antique type and lettering sources and tend to go for the clean and perfect and aesthetically refined, while neglecting the demand for fonts which are appealing for their rough, vintage and gothic qualities. So working from samples collected by art historian Pedro Lemos, I’ve created the new Montressor font. It takes its name from the narrator of Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado because it has a look reminiscent of the decadence of Spain in the later days of the Inquisition. It is a decorative initials font with has strong black letter characters with decorative embellishments plus some additional special characters for framing the initials. The look is strong, raw and somewhat gothy.

You can download and try the demo version of Montressor, in TrueType format for Mac or PC. You can also order the full version of Montressor online for immediate download: BUY IT NOW.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 10, 2010 | Filed Under Featured Fonts, Fonts, New Fonts | Leave a Comment 

Most Popular Fonts for August

In an effort to determine our most popular fonts, we’ve compiled the sales for all of our fonts here on our site and through our distributors and have the results for which fonts were the most popular for August.  It includes a lot of the fonts you would expect like Scurlock, Albemarle and Windlass, but the real surprise is in the second spot, where we discovered the attractive but not heavily promoted Rossetti font.  Anyway, if you have confidence in the judgment of others, then you should take a look at these fonts.

#1: Albemarle

#2: Rossetti

#3: Captain Kidd

#4: Scurlock

#5: Windlass

#6: Chelsea Studio

#7: Hamilton

#8: Allegheny

#9: Caliph

#10: Pontifica

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 9, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

Calligraphy Fonts Collection

When scribes first put pen to page they began the long struggle to control the written form of language and balance the demands of form and function. From humble beginnings adapting inscriptive lettering to other media, the stylistic and functional demands on written language have grown and changed and over the centuries writing has become an art form as well as a vital tool.

Early writing was often carved in stone or wood, which imposed a certain angularity of style. In the Roman period, as more and more written records were kept on vellum and papyrus, the scribes faced different restrictions and the shapes and characters of the letters began to change, becoming more
rounded and often more decorative. By the 6th or 7th century a wide diversity of distinct calligraphic styles had emerged, from the open uncial styles of Northern Europe to the formal styles of Lobmardic documents and the rough, informal lettering of Roman bureaucrats.

After the decline of Rome the focus of learning and of the written arts moved to the north and west, with much of the cultural tradition of the ancient world being preserved in the cloisters of Ireland and the British Isles. Irish monastic culture spread through Europe in the so-called Dark Ages, taking with it new styles of lettering derived from the insular minuscule and uncial styles.

With the rise in ascendancy of the Church of Rome more formal and elaborate lettering styles began to become popular. Putting aside the somewhat paganistic ornamentation of the Celtic period, the gothic styles began to emerge, with more rigid and angular character forms and elaborate majuscule letters, taking on some of the character of the complex architectural style of the high middle ages.

Gothic styles remained popular until the advent of printing, and even into the modern era in printed form in Germany and other parts of Northern Europe.

By the 14th century diversity began to reemerge in writing styles. With the growth of the middle class in England and the lowland countries, secular literacy began to increase, and a demand developed for calligraphic styles which were legible, attractive and also efficient enough to allow manuscripts to be reproduced rapidly and commercially. This period saw the emergency of court and chancery hands, informal gothic variations and the growth of the popular Bastarda or Lettres Batarde hybrid lettering style which became the standard for secular writing.

Even with printing on the horizon, the Renaissance saw the emergence of new lettering styles as widespread literacy created great demand for easy to read and quick to write styles, such as the humanist cursives of Renaissance Italy.

Early printing emerged in a variety of styles based on the diversity of calligraphic styles popular in the early modern period, but even as printing became more standardized, calligraphy did not disappear. Hand lettering remained the standard for decorative titles, captions, posters, maps and many other uses, but moved more and more into the realm of the artist. Illustrators and poster artists of the 19th century produced a diversity of unique lettering styles, from the radical slavic excesses of Alphons Mucha to the playful pseudo-uncials of Howard Pyle and Charles Folkard.

The Scriptorium’s collection of historic calligraphy is unrivaled. We offer over 140 fonts based on specific historical or artistic styles, from Roman to Medieval to modern times. All of these fonts come in TrueType or Postscript format for Macintosh and PC-compatible computers. They are available singly for between $12 and $24 each, or as a collection in a highly discounted package. The new fourth edition of our calligraphic fonts CD package is only $169. It includes all of our calligraphic fonts (over 140 at last count), plus parchment and vellum textures to simulate the look of antique papers and other surfaces.

Our single fonts complete calligraphic fonts CD can be ordered online, by mail or by phone for delivery online or by mail. To order our Complete Calligraphic Fonts collection with over 140 fonts online go to ONLINE ORDERING or if you prefer to buy your calligraphic fonts individually, try our SINGLE FONTS SECTION.

To order by phone call 1-800-797-8973.

To get an idea of what our calligraphic fonts are like, try out the shareware version of Offenbach Chancery. It doesn’t have all of the punctuation and special characters, but should give you a good idea of what calligraphic fonts can look like on your computer.

Download Offenbach for Windows (PKZip). Download Offenbach for MacOS (StuffIt).

Selected fonts in this collection. Click on name to see sample.

Allegheny
Alleghieri
Allembert
Allencon
Altenburg
Altgothic
Aneirin
Antioch Uncial
Azariel
Baraquiel
Bastarda
Belphebe
Benevento
Bienville
Bilitis
Brandywine
Brigida
Broceliande
Burgundian
Cadeaulx
Caliph
Carissimi
Carmilla
Carmilla Swash
Castiglione
Caswallon
Chaillot
Cicero
Clairveaux
Collins Old English
Constance
Corabael
Corbei Uncial
Courtrai
Coverack
Cymbeline
Dahaut
Daresiel
De Bellis
Durrow
Fabliaux
Falconis
Fiorenza
Folkard
Formidable
Franconian
Froissart
Gaiseric
Ghost Gothic
Gjallarhorn
Glendower
Gloriana
Hanes Italic
Hesperides
Interlude
Iphegenia
Isfahan
Jerash
John Speed Ornamental
John Speed
Koch Fantasie
Koch Gothic
Langhorne
Ligeia
Lindisfarne
Lyonesse
Macteris Uncial
Magdeburg
Magdelena
Malagua
Malebroche
Martel
Melcheburn
Melusine
Minerva
Morgow
Morris Black Letter
Offenbach Chancery
Orphiel
Padstow
Palmieri
Pavane
Perigord
Platthand
Pomponianus
Pontifica
Pontificaswash
Potsdam
Prelude
Procopius
Publius
Pyle Gothic
Queensland
Rackham Italic
Rackham
Ranegund
Ravenna
Rheingold
Rosalinde
Rudolfo Swash
Rudolfo
Sanctum
Scrawlies
Scurlock
Serendib
Stonecross
Stuttgart Gothic
Sualtim
Surtur
Talleyrand
Terpsichore
Textura Quadrata
Teyrnon
Theodoric
Trinculo
Tyrfing
Undine
Vespasiano
Vivat
Volund
Walsingham
Wanax
Wittenbach
Zahariel
Zothique

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 8, 2010 | Filed Under Collections, Font Collections | Leave a Comment 

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