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.
New Font: Startling Stories
  |
Startling Stories was a pulp-era science fiction magazine known for its lurid covers by Earle K. Bergey and its eye-catching title designs. It was a companion to Thrilling Wonder Stories and Fantastic Stories. The magazine was very successful in the immediate post-war period, but as the golden age of pulp magazines faded in the 1950s it became less competitive. In 1955 the publishers attempted to reach a more serious audience by changing to a less garish title style and making the cover art less lurid, and once they gave up the stylistic markers which set it aside from competing magazines sales slumped further and it was dead within the year.
Our new Startling Stories font celebrates the salacious covers and truly startling look of the magazine in its glory years and is based on the striking lettering of the main title. It includes both a bold and a regular version. the regular font comes in outline form like the original cover lettering and the bold version is a solid variant of the style. Both are kerned so that the characters overlap slightly creating the dramatic look of the magazine title.
The demo version of the font can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
Valdemar Appearing on New Chadbourn Novels
There’s nothing better for a font foundry than when one of your fonts gets picked up as the signature font for a brand or a product or a franchise. Sadly sometimes those big customers are fickle. Case in point being our Windlass font which got a nice boost from being used on the cover of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books for years, and then in the titles for the movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, but they dropped it from the cover of the more recent books and from the titles of the next movie, replacing it with something far more bland and generic. Not a good decision and not very loyal. Windlass took the books to the bestseller list and did great at the box office, so why not stick with it?
But some publishers are a bit more loyal, like Pyr who publish Mark Chabourn’s novels. A few years ago they started featuring our Valdemar font on his Age of Misrule series, and not only did they stick with it for the whole series, but now he has two new series out, The Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent, with a couple of books each, also featuring Valdemar.
Both series feature our Valdemar font for their series titles, or more specifically a combination of Valdemar and the popular companion font Valdemar Alternate. Although they have stuck with the original small caps look of the font and not used the lower case version. They have also added some variations of their own, creating a new D and a new T using elements of the I from the original font design, changes which are still consistent with the original look of the font, and forgivable given their loyalty and repeated use of the font.
Featured Font: Slava
 BUY NOW |
Slava is based on lettering by legendary Art Nouveau master Alphons Mucha from his later post-Parisian period when he returned to Prague and did a lot of design work in support of the slavic nationalist movement. The letter forms still have many of the characteristics of his theatrical posters from the 1890s, but some added slavic character which distinguish it from his earlier work. It is one of the featured fonts in our Alphons Mucha Fonts and Art Package along with a great selection of other original fonts based on Mucha designs.
The demo version of Slava can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
Alphons Mucha Fonts and Art
Alphonse Mucha was born in what is now the Czech Republic in 1860 and moved to Paris in 1890 where he became the star of the poster-art movement under the patronage of the Sarah Bernhardt, socializing with the greatest of the impressionists and moving in the highest circles of the salons of the intellectual elite of Paris. After World War I he returned to Czechoslovakia and became the father of a slavic arts and crafts movement which combined elements of art nouveau with classic national themes.
In addition to commercial art, jewelry design, interior decoration, sculpture and stage design, Mucha experimented with lettering and calligraphy to produce excellent source material for unique typefaces. Mucha’s style is virtually synonymous with French Art Nouveau and he is one of the most imitated artists and designers of all time.
The Scriptorium’s Mucha collection features a selection of rare images taken from 19th century sources, focusing on seasonal postcard art and theatrical posters, plus a disk of fonts based on Mucha’s poster lettering, including seven original typefaces in both TrueType and Postscript Format. Samples of both the art and the typefaces are provided here.
We have recently expanded our Mucha collection with new art and several additional fonts. The Mucha Collection is only $59 including shipping. It is also available in a retail package ideal for sale in museums and bookstores. Send email for information on wholesale terms and availability. To order your own Mucha collection just visit our online ordering page — ORDER YOUR MUCHA!
Abaddon in War of the Fallen
I run into our fonts in the strangest places, but it was an unexpected surprise the other day when I was playing SongPop on my iPhone with my daughters and I got a pop-up ad for a iPhone game called War of the Fallen with the title done in our Abaddon font. Abaddon is hideously overexposed, but nonetheless it’s nice to see it in a new medium.
War of the Fallen is basically be a fantasy card game with collectible elements for the iPhone – obviously influenced by games like Magic the Gathering, but with some concessions to the format. It’s an interesting idea and the art is very impressive, but the game seems static and the format is restrictive. It looks very good, but I wasn’t really drawn in and compelled to play.
However, if you like the Abaddon font, you can add it to your collection just VISIT OUR STORE.
Short Films on Typography
Here are several examples of informative short films on typography using a number of different, interesting presentation techniques of presentation. The first addresses the history of type and the second and third both deal with aspects of vocabulary and terminology in interesting ways. And finally a fun sarcastic video on the top 5 fonts to never use.
No guarantee that these videos will make you an expert on typography, but they may at least entertain for a few minutes.
New Font: Ripley
|
Ripley is a new titling font with a bold character weight and a somewhat randomly distressed and unbalanced, tall and narrow sans serif look. It includes capital letters and custom small caps weighted to match the capitals. It is based on the title lettering from the original 1955 pulp paperback printing of Patricia Highsmith’s classic suspense novel The Talented Mister Ripley, hence the name. For some reason the look of the font brings to mind something dark and Eastern European from the cold war era, which inspired the sample graphics.
The demo version of the font can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
Memorial Day Sale
Memorial Day is a great American tradition, recognizing the sacrifices made by those who have served our country in war and in peace. The tradition began during the Civil War as a day when flowers, flags and wreaths were placed on the graves of soldiers or on military memorials by relatives or by the community, an appropriate act of remembrance for their sacrifice.
But America is also the land of unabashed consumerism, so our other great tradition – perhaps less laudable – is the Memorial Day Sale. And who are we to deny this grand commercial tradition?
So just for three days, going through midnight on Monday, we’re offering a special sale. Use the coupon code MEMORIAL and you’ll receive 25% off of any purchase of $50 or more including an unlimited number of products and total value.
In addition, 10% of all sales during this period will be donated to the Wounded Warrior Project to help with the special needs of wounded veterans..
Arthur Rackham’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
In 1906 legendary illustrator Arthur Rackham was commissioned to illustrate J. M. Barrie’s prequel to his play Peter Pan. The standard edition features 10 original illustrations, but there was also a very limited edition with 40 additional illustrations which is now extremely rare. Remarkably the tipped in plates are included as an appendix to the regular book consisting of nothing but a portfolio of illustrations separate from the text.
We have collected together and digitized high resolution versions of all of the illustrations in that extended edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens which includes some of Arthur Rackhamn’s most fascinating fairy illustrations and a remarkable diversity of themes. These are examples of Rackham’s best work at the absolute height of his talents. The number and quality of these illustrations is unexcelled.
You can order the complete illustration set from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens for just $59 and you can preview all of the images below. To order now and download the package immediately, just go to our ONLINE STORE and follow the instructions. It’s a fairly large download, but manageable with a high speed connection. All of the illustrations are in high resolution and suitable for printing, with a license allowing their use within our standard restrictions.
Featured Font: Bilitis
|
Bilitis is an original “brush script” style font we designed for a project back in 1998 and released then with some success. It has a strong visual appeal with rough hewn character forms which are very unusual. In this new release we’ve also added a larger selection of alternate character forms and ligatures to add more variety if you want to explore the extended character set. As a script which doesn’t have too much of a refined and elegant look it’s a nice alternative style to have in your collection.
The demo version of Bilitis can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
