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
Coming Soon: Spenser’s The Shepheard’s Calender Decorated by Walter Crane
One of the works we have in development right now is a a collection of all of the frames, borders, decorations and illustrations from Walter Crane’s lavish 1898 edition of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Shepheard’s Calender. It’s particularly notable for its decorative borders and motifs like the two-page opening spread shown above (click on the image for a larger view). In an appropriately seasonal release, look for it to be available this Spring.
New Font: Rodrigo Initials
| Rodrigo is a new font based on a set of 16th century woodcut initials with floral, fruit and animal motifs for decoration. The designs are rather reminiscent of Italian silver work of that period, which brought to mind the lavish dinners held by the Borgias, and hence the name after the notorious Rodrigo Borgia who became Pope Alexander VI. The font includes a full set of uppercase characters, but because it is an initial font there are now lowercase characters or punctuation, but it should work well in combination with fonts from our Renaissance Collection. You can try the DEMO version of Rodrigo for free by registering. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $18 online and download it right away. |
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Constructing Art Deco Emblems
Pedro Lemos was one of the outstanding artists of the California Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century. He was known for his woodcuts and his graphic design work and for his books on teaching art, particularly his Applied Arts handbook which was published in 1926. It is one of the most useful works on basic techniques of graphic design and arts and crafts, made more interesting because of the contemporary perspective which it provides on the transitional period between the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods in art.
We’ve produced several other small PDF booklets based on Lemos design guides, including one on bookbinding and another on Color Harmony and they were quite popular. Now we’re adding another entry to that series with something a little more advanced. It’s a handy guide to the process of creating art deco floral motifs, essentially by deconstructing and reconstructing floral images, starting with something very realistic and ending up with a very idealized result.
Art Fonts
 Art fonts (sometimes called “dingbats”) have their origins in early printers ornaments or artistic marginalia used to fill space on a page and break up large blocks of type. Traditionally these ornaments took the form of floral or geometric designs, and were inserted when the page was set, just like letter type.
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Featured Font: Vafthrudnir
| With the upcoming release of Marvel’s Thor movie, things viking are all trendy right now. The movie features a rather uninspiring font choice for its title design, so I looked through our Viking Fonts and Art collection for what I thought would be the best choice for titles on a movie about the hammer-wielding thunder god, and the obvious choice seemed to be Vafthrudnir.
Vafthrudnir has a rough, bold, quasi-runic look, with strongly vertical character forms which make it excellent for a lot of uses. In fact, we used it for the menu bar links in our online store and people keep noticing it there and asking about it. It features two different versions of the uppercase character, with a standard variation and a more runic-looking alternative. It’s a strong font, plus it has a cool name. How can you go wrong? You can try the DEMO version of Vafthrudnir for free, but it includes only one version of each character. Or you can ORDER the full version online and download it right away. |
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Walter Crane’s A Flower Wedding
We’re still working on digitizing our extensive collection of antique Walter Crane illustrated books. Our latest project is Crane’s 1905 work A Flower Wedding, an original poem illustrated with 39 decorative full-page plates. The concept of the work is that each of the wedding guests represents a flower and is depicted with that flower incorporated in the illustration. The illustrations are detailed and done in pastel colors in keeping with the floral motif. Unlike many of Crane’s other works which feature full, framed panels, the illustrations in A Flower Wedding are more delicate and stand alone, their edges fading into the background of the page.
The illustrations are lovely. The fanciful costuming of the characters and the little details which are included are particularly memorable. Stylistically they are most similar to Crane’s Queen Summer which we released recently. The lettering of the verses is in a style very similar to our Walter Crane font. We’ve collected all of the illustrations in high resolution format with the colors adjusted and defects edited out. The package includes all the illustrations individually, as well as a handy PDF format recreation of the original book for easy reference.
The Art of Sideshow Banners
A couple of weeks ago I took my daughter to the Travis County Rodeo, not so much for the animals and shows, as for the accompanying carnival run by Crabtree Amusements. They have some excellent rides, but what always catches the eye is that for larger events they also bring along their classic sideshow. What draws your eye to the sideshow is the wall of colorful banners advertising attractions like “Molly the Mermaid,” the “Chupacabra” and of course “Tyrone the Giant Rat.”
Those banners are by Bobby Rawls, one of several contemporary artists who specialize in recreating the look of classic sideshow banners which follow a format and style which goes back more than a century. The frame is always red, the title banner is gold, there’s usually an emblem with a one-word epithet like “Alive!” and the art itself is highly stylized with bold contrasting colors. Of course, the figures are grotesque and titillating, provoking the viewer to come into the sideshow and see what the real thing is like.
April Fools Recap
Every year we try to amuse with some sort of April Fools prank. This year it was the unbuyable yet strangely insistent Sideshow font, but we’ve done some even bigger and sillier things in previous years. Here are some examples preserved as best we could.
1998 April Fools Page
1999 April Fools Page.
2000 April Fools Page.
2001 April Fools Page.
2002 April Fools Page.
2003 April Fools Page.
2004 April Fools Page.
2006 April Fools Page.
2008 April Fools Page.
2009 April Fools Page.
Hope you find them amusing. 1998 and 2002 were probably the biggest hits – certainly my favorites as well. The 2002 page actually results in several calls from churches looking for baptismal fonts every year. Nothing is available for 2005 or 2007 because both of them consisted of joke fonts which did horrible things when you tried to use them.
Dave
Monks™ Available for Home or Office Installation
Through an arrangement with Abbot Gregor of the Monastery of St. Ioan in Suceava Rumania we are proud to finally be able to offer direct, personal Scriptorium services. For a small fee we can now replace your current laser or inkjet printer with a genuine Monk™ (similar to the one pictured below) fully trained in Greek, Latin and Hebrew transcription and multiple calligraphic styles.
Monks™ require minimal maintenance and are available in Ukrainian, Moldavian, Serbian and Coptic varieties. You also have your choice of beard styles, lengths and colors. Just provide your Monk™ with a bowl of gruel and a flask of water and make sure he has plenty of ink available and you’ll be able to produce many pages of attractive, scriptorium-quality output before he has to be replaced.
Unlike temperamental and noisy inkjet and laser printers, Monks™ have taken vows of humility, chastity, obedience and silence. They are used to physical mortification so they are durable and respond well to discipline. Monks™ are guaranteed to perform at an output level of 3 pages per hour in text mode or 1 page per hour in full-color illumination mode.
When your Monk™ is worn out, just place him in the handy plastic recycling bag and ship him back to the monastery to be recycled. A fresh monk will be sent back by return mail for a discounted replacement fee. Monks™ carry a full warranty, but the sanity clause in the warranty will be voided if you require copies of unholy texts such as the Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis or the Pnakotic Manuscript.
Don’t be stuck in the Dark Ages! Order your Monk™ today.
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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.
