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
Glastonbury Font Featured in St. Alban’s Alumni Magazine
It may not reach our ideal target audience, but there’s something very flattering about having my work covered in a feature article in my high-school’s alumni magazine. A while you may have seen an article about the development of the Glastonbury font back in the fall of 2009. It was a collaborative project which I undertook for my alma mater, St. Albans School, to provide them with a font to use to do the inscriptions of student names on the walls of the school refectory.
Well, down the road a bit, the St. Albans Bulletin decided to publish a feature on the project. Molly Meinhardt interviewed me by email and also talked to others involved in the project like local wall artist Raea Jean Leinster and the result is a pretty comprehensive look at how the project was done, what went into producing the font and the end results. It’s surprisingly in-depth for something written to appeal to a diverse audience. I’m not sure that many St. Albans graduates are in the design or publishing industries, but I think that they’ll still find the article an entertaining read.
It’s a pretty good bet that few people who visit this site read the St. Albans Bulletin or are StA graduates, so I’ve uploaded the article as a PDF for those who want to read an interesting piece on how a font was created to meet a specific need. Click on the image at the top right to download the PDF of the article.
In Development: Owen Jones’ Spanish Ballads
We’ve done several previous packages based on designs by Victorian design historian Owen Jones. They include our fantastic Grammar of Ornament package and the new Gray’s Elegy.
Our next addition to our selection of Jones design packages is a mammoth undertaking of all of the decorations, initials, emblems and borders in his early illustrated edition of J. G. Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads, a rare work which has an amazing selection of antique-style decorations with a Spanish or Moorish theme. Every section has its own unique border design and each chapter features unique decorative initials, section headers, fully illustrated pages and marginalia. It isn’t hand tinted or painted like some of Jones’ other books, but the sheer number of decorations is unbeatable.
Because of the characteristics of the printing and the higher acid content of the paper the images are requiring a lot of processing. Combine that with the large number of images and the preparation of the package is taking longer than is typical. We expect it to be ready sometime later in the summer, once we’ve had a chance to process and clean up all of the images. For now, here are a few samples to give you an idea of the content. You can click on any of them to see it in a somewhat larger size.
Featured Font: Rosalinde
| Rosalinde was first released in 1999 and it was one of our first attempts at an informal handwriting-style font. It is a bit more than just a regular handwriting font. It has some stylized characteristics and unusual character forms which give it a really unique overall appearance. I’ve always thought of it as a great font for doing a page of handwritten text or a poem, enhanced by the high ascenders and descenders. If you like the look and want a companion font which is more structured and more calligraphic looking it has a very similar weight and size to our Gaiseric font. This version of Rosalinde is updated with some improved characters and the addition of an international character set.
You can try the DEMO version of Rosalinde for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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Monospaced Fonts and the Waffle House
As someone who is a bit more decoratively inclined my thoughts usually tend to follow a different track, but the other night I was up late and looking for a bite to eat and stopped in at the Waffle House. While waiting for my eggs and gazing out the window my eye was caught by the ubiquitous sign and it immediately struck me what a perfect example of the concept of a monospaced font it is.
The Waffle House sign is made up of a series of perfectly regular squared with characters inside them and the characters are uniform in width and height, illustrating very clearly the relationship between a character and the space it occupies, as well as showing how characters can be made to look relatively normal while having a uniform height and width.
Of course, most monospaced fonts do not have height and width in a one-to-one ratio, but they are often have specific proportional ratios between width and height. The Waffle House sign also benefits from only having specific letters and ones which are mostly easy to fit into a uniform space. How they would have dealt with “I” or “M” and made them look good is one of the questions about the Waffle House which remain forever unanswered…
We have some interesting monospaced fonts, including Onuava and Cincinnatus which are two of our most popular. We actually have one which has the one-to-one height to width ratio, but Big Block doesn’t look much like the Waffle House font.
Script Fonts Package
Click any font to see a larger sample.
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Of all the different types of font, the one style which seems to be in constant demand is script fonts. Over the years we’ve produced a lot of different styles of script fonts, mostly based on historic calligraphy, but we’ve usually only made them available singly or as part of calligraphic bundles. In 1999 we finally put all our script fonts together into a single package, but we kept releasing more to meet demand, and now we’ve released a new, updated version with many additional fonts.  Our script fonts package has just been expanded with the inclusion of many new script fonts released in the past year. It now includes two dozen different fonts, representing many styles, from the wild, rough swashes of Queensland to the elegance of Corabael and Belphebe. Many of these fonts are from our Master Fonts collection, with an expanded character set and other features. This package is a unique opportunity to get them at a substantial discount. The whole package costs less than the Master Fonts it includes would cost singly, plus you get many additional fonts.  The new Third Edition of the Script Fonts Collection is available on CD or for delivery through email for $79. You can call to purchase the package by phone at 1-800-797-8973 (01-512-276-7352), or order it from our online ordering site. Just CLICK HERE  If you have the earlier release of the package you can update to the new release for only $29 and get all the new fonts on a new CD. This offer is ONLY available if you have the previous release and are in our database. You can call to upgrade by phone at 1-800-797-8973 (01-512-276-7352), or order it from our online ordering site. Just CLICK HERE  To get an idea of what our script fonts are like, try out the demo version of our latest one, Orphiel. It doesn’t have all of the punctuation and variant characters, but should give you a good idea of what one of our script fonts can look like on your computer.  Orphiel from a sample of Edwardian period hand lettering, mainly because we wanted to offer an alternative to our Belphebe font for invitations, menus and wedding announcements. It’s an elegant font, with nice variations in weight and capital letters which are quite ornate. Orphiel is probably the last new script font we’ll do for a while. The amount of work which goes into properly kerning a script font and making sure that the letters connect and flow properly, is just phenomenal. Orphiel demanded even more attention than most, and our collection of script fonts is now pretty much unrivalled. Click here to download the working trial version of Orphiel 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: Aerobrush
 I was playing around with some paint at our chicken coop and realized I had an opportunity to do some hands-on design work for a brush-style font, so I did a set of sample brush strokes on a piece of the recycled coroplast which covers the sides of the coop. Those samples were the perfect starting point for designing a new brush script font. I took digital photos of the brush strokes, simplified them in black and white and imported them into a font design program where I converted them to outlines. Starting with the base letter forms of our Airship font I then added the brush stroke samples to the characters in natural locations and the result is the Aerobrush font which looks remarkably like it was painted with a house-painter’s brush. Kind of an ideal font for the signs at the entrance to a summer camp in a horror movie. It even includes a full set of alternate characters for some of the variation you’d expect in a hand painted sign.
You can try the DEMO version of Aerobrush for free by registering. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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Captain Kidd at the Book Fair
Last week was the Scholastic Book Fair at my youngest daughter’s school, and while browsing the book selections I was pleased to discover several of our fonts on the covers of several recently released childrens and young adult books whcih I hadn’t seen before.
Most notable among the featured fonts was our popular Captain Kidd font which was on the covers of There’s No Such Thing as Dragons by Philip Reeve, Shadow by Jenny Moss and most appropraitely on Pirates by Daniel Harrison. It was nice to see Captain Kidd in use on these sorts of books, especially a pirate book when it has been neglected in favor of our Windlass font for so many pirate-related projects. Now we just need to get them on board with some of our other piratical fonts like Queensland, Hesperides and Malagua.
The books look pretty interesting. Pirates is lavishly illustrated and is basically just straightforward history aimed at kids. There’s No Such Thing as Dragons is fairly formulaic juvenile fantasy, but it gets an extra point or two for also using Windlass for the interior titles. Shadow is a juvenile fantasy novel aimed more at girls, and uses Captain Kidd extensively in the interior as well as on the cover, with good results.
Protected: Bonus Font for Facebook Followers
Austin de Croze’s Calendrier Magique
In stumbling around art resources on the internet I sometimes run into amazing resources and collections of art which I never expected to see online or anywhere else for that matter. But there are some conscientious archivists and academics out there who react properly when they see something rare and strange. Too many of their colleagues react defensively and want to hoard their treasures, but some few noble souls realize that unique works need to be shared and that the internet is a fantastic way to do it.
One example of this is Cornell University’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and their charming online museum of The Fantastic in Art and Fiction, an online collection of historical images on themes of the fantastic and magical, taken from printed works of the 18th and 19th century. There are lots of great images included from various rare books on magic and mysticism. Some of the images are fairly familiar, but what really stands out in the collection is one of the few books they have preserved all the images from, Austin de Croze’s amazing Art Nouveau Calaedrier Magique. It’s a remarkable work of French art nouveau graphic arts design, reminiscent of the best of the Jugendstil movement of the same period. It’s a unique work which was produced in an edition of only 777 copies in 1895 making it rare enough that you’ll likely never see a copy in person much less have a chance to buy and own one. So it’s great that Cornell has preserved the whole thing.
Obviously, it’s a calendar. Producing calendars was a common practice of the art book and magazine publishers of the art nouveau period. In fact, Munchner Jugend produced some very interesting calenders. But nothing I’ve seen is like this work. The integration of unique art, hand lettering, graphic decoration and fantastic themes is phenomenal. Each page is a revelation and at first look I found it hard to believe it was over 100 years old. Some of the designs are so clever and so modern looking that at first I thought it must be a hoax, but by all appearances it’s the real thing. Some of the images are disturbing, some are erotic and all of them are rich fodder for the imagination.
The only thing to do if you’re at all interested in art nouveau design or fantastic-themed art is to go look at it for yourself. You’ll enjoy the tour. Although I suspect the pages could be in better condition, my one real complaint it’s that the images aren’t in higher resolution. I’m guessing the original calendar was about 4 by 11, but wit the digital images at only 72dpi I found myself disappointed in the lack of zoomability. But the presentation is nice and you can get a great feel for this fascinating work. If you happen to see a copy in a rare book store, pick it up and send it to me. My birthday is just around the corner.
Featured Font: Gloriana
| Gloriana was originally released in 1999 based on samples of hand lettering in an illustated childrens book from the early 1900s. It was one of several conceptually similar fonts we did during that period, including Gaiseric, Rosalinde, Scurlock and Folkard. For some reason Folkard was the big hit of the various fantasy themed fonts we did as part of that project and although Gloriana was the one which was most similar to Folkard and also one of the most interesting of those designs, it just didn’t take off in the same way. Now it’s time to give it another chance. We think its combination of hand-drawn personality, lots of alternate characters and decorative elements makes it special and deserving of more attention. You can try the DEMO version of Gloriana for free by registering. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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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.
