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
Make Your Font Contest – Deadline Extended
Although judging has begun on the Make Your Font Contest and we do have a number of promising entries, we’ve decided to extend the deadline for entries until the 7th of September while we process the initial entries and prepare them for judging. So if you wanted to take part, but missed the deadline, you have an additional week to get your entry in.
The Make Your Font Contest is a chance for people with great ideas but no font design experience to see their design turned into an original font. You draw your font and we digitize the winning entries. We will take submissions of hand drawn or computer rendered fonts in three categories. The designers of the winning entries will receive a Scriptorium gift certificate as a prize and their designs will be made into a font which will they will get a copy of and which will be added to our product line. Winners will also receive a royalty on any future sales of their font. The three categories are:
- Calligraphic – Entries should be complete alphabets hand lettered with a pen with the look of traditional or free form calligraphy.
- Constructed – Entries should be complete aphabets drawn or constructed, either physically or digitally.
- Ornaments – Entries should be sets of at least 26 original ornamental glyphs with a common theme.
The Make Your Font Contest is open to anyone who wants to enter who is 18 years or older and agrees to some simple rules which will be available in complete form when the contest starts. We will be taking entries starting on August 15th and ending on August 29th. One winner will be picked in each category. All entries must be original designs, submitted in JPG format of sufficiently high resolution to render good outlines. For more information see the contest rules and guidelines (PDF). Questions and submissions can be emailed to: contest@fontcraft.com.
A Special Offer on Our Font Club
As a special offer to round out the summer we’re offering a one-time discount on new and renewal memberships in our Font Club. The Font Club is a unique subscription service where you get the complete versions of each of our featured new font releases as they are released, including both the True Type and Postscript Versions for Windows and MacOS.
Since we release two new featured fonts each month, this means that a year’s membership will get you 26 fonts at a price less than a third of their normal individual cost. In addition, when you sign up you will receive a special bonus font exclusively available to Font Club members. Our bonus font for new members this season is the new Ribbon Banner font which is shown to the left. It’s a Font Club exclusive. Plus, if you sign up for two years you’ll get another bonus font halfway through your membership. With a one year membership that’s 27 fonts for less than $3 each. With a two year membership that’s 50 fonts for less than $2 each. It’s a very hard deal to beat, but we can beat it. Memberships are normally $79 for one year and $129 for two, but through September 2nd if you sign up or renew you can get $10 off your one-year membership (coupon code CLUBONE) or $20 off a 2 year membership (coupon code CLUBTWO. Just use the correct code on checkout.
Our monthly font releases include a wide variety of interesting fonts, including unique decorative titling fonts, hand-lettered fonts and elegant text fonts. If you join the font club now you’ll start out with two new fonts. Your bonus font will be our Holiday Borders font, and your first membership font will be Malvern. Soon thereafter you’ll also get our next new font. After that, every two weeks you will be surprised by a new font before we even release the demo version on our website. You’ll get lots of great fonts, plus there’s an intriguing element of mystery as you anticipate what strange font ideas we’ll come up with next.
To sign up, just go to: JOIN or try a TWO YEAR MEMBERSHIP.
Protected: New Font Club Fonts
Featured Font: Circuit
| Circuit was designed for a project back in the late 1990s and has languished in our back catalog since then because of its very specialized look, though it is featured in our Futuristic Fonts collection. We were reminded about it recently because of its use in an upcoming book project and it seemed like a good time to make it a featured font. Its origins are interesting. The character forms are taken from a font we designed for an industrial client, but to make it unique we actually used scanned images of circuit boards from an old Macintosh computer to produce the unique patterning in the characters.
You can try the DEMO version of |
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Dark Shadows Project: Looking at Old English Fonts
In developing an updated font for Dark Shadows one interesting challenge is that there are only two upper case characters to use as a starting point. What is immediately apparent about them is that they fit into the category of “Old English” style fonts, a popular term for a particular style of black letter font developed for the publishing industry in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the days of metal type everyone had a black letter font and although no two were exactly the same, they all shared certain characteristics and were often remarkably similar.
While it was obviously quite difficult to identify the specific Old English font which was used for the D and the S in the original Dark Shadows titles (shown to the left), some research presented many similar fonts of the right period and general appearance, starting with our own classic font Collins Old English, which coincidentally shares the same name as the family the TV series was based around.
While Collins Old English was a good first point of reference, it differs in several particulars from the font in the original titles, particularly in having a somewhat lighter overall weight and having double spurs on the characters instead of single spurs. It also has an overall narrower look than the original titles and also flourishes on the ends of some of the swashes. Those flourishes are very typical of Old English fonts, and are an element which might be desirable to incorporate in a reimagined Dark Shadows font because they make the font look more gothic and more antique than the very plain style of the original titles.
The next step was to do some research and look at some Old English font alternatives in our extensive library of old books on type and lettering. In this my eye was drawn to two examples of metal type from the early 20th century (shown to the left of this paragraph and to the right of the next) and also to one example of a hand lettered Old English style by German-American sign painter and calligrapher Hermann Esser (the last sample).
Of these, Pendleton Old English (above and left) was probably closest stylistically to the original titles, but was much lighter in overall weight, sort of like Collins Old English, while Shaw Old English (right) and Esser Old English (below and left) were closest in weight, but not great matches in every particular of their style and features.
All three of the fonts featured some flourishes, but by this point I had determined that the best approach was to take the titles farther and make them more ornate and fanciful than the originals, so that wasn’t a problem. In overall shape, weight and features Shaw Old English seemed like the best choice for a starting point, with Esser Old English as a secondary point of reference.
One of the determining factors in this was that Shaw Old English included the same kind of ball-style caps on some of the flourishes as the original S, something which none of the other fonts had. Several questions remained, of course. Should the D have double spurs like Esser Old English or the single spurs of the original and of Shaw Old English. Should it retain the longer upper stroke of Shaw and Esser or a shorter top stroke like the original. And should the interior of the D have two vertical lines or just one like the original. In most of these decisions I leaned towards Shaw Old English, with some notable modifications. You can guess what they are until the next installment.
Scurlock Featured in New Cthulhu Movie
While looking for something good to watch on Netflix I stumbled on a movie recently released on DVD called The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu. I wasn’t expecting much from a low budget independent horror film, but watching turned out to be a series of pleasant surprises. The first and biggest surprise was that my font Scurlock was featured as the font for the main opening title sequence. They screwed around with the “A” in the word “Last” but aside from that it looked good in a rather well designed graphic title sequence. They stuck with the original version of the font with small caps instead of lowercase, but the movie may have been made before the newer version was released. It would have been nice to see Scurlock on the DVD cover as well, but we can’t have everything.
That aside, the film was much better than I expected. It was a combination of humor and a decent story drawing on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Basically masks and cheap special effects, but the performances were a lot better than I would have expected, the plot was simple but made sense and the creature effects were inexpensive but not cheesy. Both the opening and closing title sequences were very well done and there was a clever animated sequence in the early part of the movie which used a comic book to lay out the backstory of Cthulhu effectively without having to resort to special effects which would have been impossible to do on a limited budget. So long as you’re not someone offended by the idea of mixing Lovecraft with humor, this is really one of the better Lovecraft-based films to come out in recent years. Well worth a watch.
And for the record this is the third H. P. Lovecraft based film to use one of our fonts for the on-screen titles.
New Font: Scrapple
| Scrapple is a new font based on the idea of constructing characters from a limited selection of wood blocks featuring round and rectangular shapes. Scrapple has a cool, crude and industrial look. It’s all uppercase, but the lowercase character spaces include a set of alternate versions of all the characters to make your designs look more handmade. It looks great in graphics with a bevel around it and a scratchy blockprint pattern imposed on it so it looks hand printed. The name, of course, comes from everyone’s favorite high-energy breakfast food.
You can try the DEMO version of Scrapple for free, but it only has one of the character sets. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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The Dark Shadows Font Project Revisited
The Dark Shadows font project is back on track…
When I first heard that there was a new Dark Shadows movie in development I was pretty excited, especially since it was a Tim Burton project and he has used fonts I designed in some of his past films. I started tossing ideas around for a design for a special font for the movie – not at their request, but purely on spec. Then it looked like the movie was going to take forever to get into production, backed up behind other projects, so I set the project aside for a while. Well the latest on IMDB is that they’ve more or less finished casting and may start shooting soon, with an eye on a release date in May of next year.
That means the Dark Shadows font project is back on the front burner, at least for my amusement, though who knows where it might go. I’ve already done the initial research for the font, drawing on five years watching the show devoutly as a kid, and using video clips as a reference for the kinds of designs which were used for the titles of various incarnations of the show
The starting point for the project is the original title font from the first four years of the series which is visible in the first image to the right. The second image shows the title from the poster for the theatrical movie House of Dark Shadows. The third image shows the title from the 1991 primetime series which is an updated variant of the original title style. All of these title designs will to some degree inform the final design, especially the initial D and S characters from the original.
My first inclination is to follow the idea of the original titles where the initial letters are in a gothic style and the other letters are in more of a text style, possibly drawn from the style of the House of Dark Shadows movie titles. It also occurs to me that because a part of the story is set in the 1790s drawing on colonial typeface design makes a lot of sense, so it seems logical to move towards more of a woodcut look for both the initial capitals and the main text letters. I’m also thinking about borrowing some ideas from the original lettering in the titles of Burton’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow to give the font a rougher and more edgy look. And before you even ask, I do hate the titles from the last season of the original series and don’t plan to incorporate them in the design. The idea would be to pull all of these inspirations together into an original font which draws on the tradition while being original and new at the same time. It should be a font which people look at and immediately think of Dark Shadows but if anything even more of an embodiment of the gothic atmosphere of the series.
So now the project ought to move forward more quickly. Look for preliminary drawings of the font in the next installment.
William Morris Font and Art Collection
William Morris was one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement and closely involved with the Pre-Raphaelite artists of the mid-19th century. His ideal of integrating art, literature and graphic design inspired a generation of artists like Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Millais and Waterhouse. Morris was an artist, poet, writer and designer himself. He is probably best remembered for his fabric designs and his book designs for Kelmscott Press, especially their edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer known as the Kelmscott Chaucer
, for which Morris designed all the fonts, borders and decorations and commissioned illustrations by pre-raphaelite master Edward Burne-Jones. He pioneered modern renderings of antique styles of type as well as the production of high-quality home furnishings, including the famous reclining Morris Chair
. Morris left behind an enduring legacy of quality and creativity which will continue to inspire artists for years to come.
Our Morris collection includes an excellent selection of Morris’ fabric designs and patterns, plus a collection of original fonts based on his type designs for books published by the Kelmscott Press. We have recently augmented the collection with new fonts, new patterns and the addition of a large selection of decorative borders, emblems and initials.
Morris floral and leaf fabric patterns are excellent for use in web page design. They can be made into contiguous tiles for use as backgrounds on web pages. They also make excellent backdrops for decorative pages in print and great endpapers for books with a classic look. Each of the patterns in our Morris collection is a high-resolution image and suitable for use online or in print. Above you can see the original patterns from the collection. The new patterns added in the latest update are shown to the left.
The fonts featured in this collection are shown to the right. The first three are the original set, and the two in lighter green are our most recent additions. Morris Initials is based on initials done for the Kelmscott Chaucer. The second font is Kelmscott, based on Morris’ Troy type which was used to set many of his books. The third is True Golden, based on Morris’ Golden type which was also widely used in books from the Kelmscott Press. The first of the new fonts is Morris Black Letter, based on hand lettering Morris did as a prototype for what eventually developed into the Troy style. The second is Chaucerian Initials, based on the illuminated capitals in the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer’s works. The relationship between the text faces and the initials is clear to see, and they work very well in combination.
To the left you can see some samples of the newly added borders, frames and emblems from Morris’ edition of Chaucer. These include a wide variety of large and small floral borders as well as unusual initials which include complete words embedded in the decorations of the initial.
Like many of our collections, the Morris collection has now grown to the point where it is only available on CD. The complete collection is only $59. Our Morris collection is also available in a retail package ideal for sale in museums and bookstores. Send email for information on wholesale terms and availability. You can order the Morris collection for delivery online or by mail from our online store.
If you want to try out one of our Morris fonts, give Chaucerian Initials a try. The demo version is slightly different from the final version which is in the Morris package. You can download the True Type version which will work with Windows or MacOS right here.
Coming Soon – Scrapple Font
Here’s a first look at an unusual font we’ve got in the works. Scrapple got its inspiration from some samples of crude block-print lettering. It’t got a cool industrial look and a set of alternate characters. Plus it’s named after everyone’s favorite breakfast food. Look for it as a featured no font soon.
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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.
