How Captain Kidd Was Designed

This article originally appeared on our site as a seven-part series of featured articles in 2004.  It was recently recovered from an archive and is presented here as a complete article for the first time.

PART I

Sometimes when I’m working on new fonts I like to have a classic movie in the background. Recently one of the movies I watched was the great old film “Captain Kidd” starring Charles Laughton and Randolph Scott. While watching it with one eye and working with the other, I noticed that the film featured some very stylish piratically evocative title lettering – not to mention some lovely calligraphic maps. So I thought I’d take a stab at recreating the title lettering as a font and even document it in a series of articles showing how a font goes from an idea to final output.

The starting point for this font was a set of screen shots taken from the DVD of “Captain Kidd”. As is the case with a lot of old films the titles are extensive and show up right at the start of the film against a static backdrop. This makes them relatively accessible for screen shots, or in this case, higher resolution shots taken with a digital camera. It also means that a good selection of sample characters is available for reference. The example to the right is one of the best of these shots, because the lettering is particularly large. Many of the others are not as helpful because the print size is smaller, so some of the character details are harder to make out. However, using the best of the images as a starting point I can get enough bits and pieces to construct most of the other characters in high quality, using the lower quality images as a reference for the more unusual character shapes
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Rating 3.50 out of 5

January 3, 2012 | Filed Under Articles, Design | Leave a Comment 

Better Font Choices for the Holidays

You’re not going to use Helvetica or Times Roman for your holiday cards are you? What could be more generic or empty? The holidays need style, panache and a personal touch. You need fonts for cards and family newsletters which weren’t picked by a committee at Microsoft. So here are some fun and stylish suggestions.

First off, any holiday card envelope or even a return address label can really be enhanced with the addition of an appropriate emblem or border. For that we recommend a font like our Rackham Holiday Ornaments, featuring silhouette images from Dickens’ Christmas Carol.
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Rating 4.00 out of 5

December 6, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Classic Fonts | 1 Comment 

Clara Peck Lettering in The Prince of Mercuria

I recently picked up a copy of the novel The Prince of Mercuria by Atkinson Kimball with illustrations by Clara Elsene Peck.  When I saw it online I figured I had to have it to add to my collection of Peck-illustrated books, particularly because it has a particularly good set of samples of her calligraphy.

The novel is a reasonably good Graustark/Zenda type novel of the early 1900s, which I suspect was origianlly serialized in <i>Harper’s Bazaar</i> or one of the other Hearst magazines.  This version is its first appearance in complete novel format and it suffers somewhat from the transition.  The great calligraphy, like that featured on the entirely handlettered frontispiece to the right, suffers considerably because of the inferior quality of the paper on which the book is printed.  You can see from the detail of the words “New York” (below) how the rough fibers and porosity of the cheap paper have caused the ink to break up and spread, producing a relatively poor representation of the original lettering.

In developing another font from these samples for our inevitable Peck collection to go with Peck Initials, Elsene and Peck Shields, I will kind of have to reverse engineer the characters, making them less blurred and broken and recreating their ideal forms.  There won’t be any simple importing and tracing with this sort of source material, unless I can find a copy of the serialized version which was almost certainly printed on much better paper.

Anyway, this will be one of the projects we have in the works in the next few months. The Prince of Mercuria also has some nice marginalia and borders which might end up in a font or at least be included in an eventual Peck package as graphics.

Rating 4.00 out of 5

November 17, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Clara Peck, Designers | Leave a Comment 

Font Over-Exposure: Too Much of a Good Thing

Have you ever noticed that there are some fonts that get used over and over and over again until you start to wonder why anyone would use that font you just saw on 3 software boxes, 4 book covers and 2 movie titles in the last week on yet another product or ad? I’m not talking about relatively generic text fonts which get used again and again and don’t really register as being repetitive. That’s not really a problem. The problem is with very unusual title or display fonts with a specialized look which you can’t help remembering when you see them.

These are usually fonts which appeal to a particular audience or fit a particular theme. A designer sees them and says “hey, this font is just what I need”. He ought to be hearing an echo, because a dozen other designers are saying the same thing at the same moment. The phenomenon even feeds on itself, because a designer may have seen the font in question on some similar product in the past and forgotten about it, but the look lodged in the back of his mind somewhere, so when he is put to work on something with a related theme that look and that font match his expectations even if only subconsciously and pop right to the front of his brain when it’s time to pick a font for his project.

Morpheus is the classic example of an overused font. It and the many similar or clone fonts which are out there appear everywhere. I was in a bookstore today and saw Morpheus or an equivalent font on the covers of more than a dozen books, several DVDs, two calendars, a poster and a couple of CDs. It was hard to turn around without seeing it. It has a combination of unique peculiar looking elements which seem to create an impression of mysticism and magic, hence everyone latches onto it for any supernatural or magical design from fantasy novels to horror movies.

One of our fonts is similarly overexposed. Abaddon has become the favorite of the heavy metal rock, gothic and horror markets. If you go into a Hot Topic store in the mall Abaddon assails your eyes from every angle, with its most prominent exposure as the logo font for the band Godsmack. While this is gratifying to us as designers and font publishers, just as I’m sure the success of Morpheus is pleasing to its designer, the level of overexposure of these fonts is also frustrating.

Once a font reaches the level of overexposure you begin to see other, better and more appropriate fonts being passed over because designers have an unconscious impetus towards the look which has become established for the genre they work in, or they are just lazy and say “hey, this is a horror movie, let’s just use the font that was used on The Craft” or “Our goth-metal band’s CD cover should use that cool font on my Godsmack T-Shirt”. That’s not a terribly creative process when there are so many other great fonts which could be used instead of the obvious choices. Good fonts get neglected and fonts of questionable quality get entrenched and become tediously overused.

As a designer you ought to be conscious not just of fitting in with an established genre but also of the value of creating a unique original look for your product. It doesn’t take that much effort to go out and find a font which produces the same kind of impression as an overused font, but which has its own personality. We font designers are working all the time to produce new fonts which meet the same needs as other popular fonts but have their own unique look. Take advantage of our efforts and put these alternative fonts to work. In many cases newer fonts designed to fill the same niche as popular fonts are really better designs.

Morpheus has a number of technical flaws and aesthetic inconsistencies which may be fixed in an alternative font like our Orpheus. Even Abaddon has shortcomings. It’s one of our early designs and rather crude, with small caps instead of lower case characters and other shortcomings. Someone out there took advantage of this to produce a clone font with a rather nice lower case character set, and we’ve even made several similar fonts which are more interesting in several ways like Gehenna and Gehenna Extreme.  By looking a little further afield you can come up with intriguing alternatives to the obvious font choices and the result is that you may get a better made, more attractive font, plus people will be less likely to pigeonhole or make assumptions about your product because of the association with the products which made an overexposed font famous.

Using Abaddon for your band logo says “we’re a Godsmack clone”. Using Gehenna says “we’re sort of like Godsmack, but cool and original too”. There are an awful lot of fonts out there – something for every taste and whim. When designing a logo or the cover for a product try not to be seduced by obvious choices and overexposed fonts. Do a bit more work and explore your options. You’re likely to find an even better font which you can make your own. Then when your design or your product becomes a huge hit, you can start the process of overxposing that new font and see everyone else using it in imitation of you, trying to grab onto a little of your success.

Rating 4.00 out of 5

October 30, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Fonts | Leave a Comment 

Mining Horror Comics for Font Ideas

I’m always mining the great graphic legacy of past eras for cool resources to use as the basis for fonts, and while I more typically go to antique sources, there’s a lot of great material to be found in the relatively recent past in vintage products of popular art like the covers and artistic content of pop novels and comic books.

With Halloween approaching, my attention was focused on sources for horrific fonts and so I went wandering the web looking for lettering from classic horror comics. They were a big element of the comics market when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. As a teen I was particularly taken with the large-format black and white comics like Eerie and Creepy which defied the comic code, but there was also a lot of good material in the more crudely produced color horror comics of the 50s and 60s which were more conventional but still featured creative lettering and quality art.

My big disappointment in this quest was my inability to find good examples of interior lettering on the internet, requiring me to go rummaging in the garage for actual physical printed comics (see more on this later), but I did find excellent sources from examples of cover art and lettering, including coverbrowser.com which I previously used as a source for pulp novel covers, and some nice higher quality images at samuelsdesign.com.

With a lot of great source material to consider, what I was ultimately drawn to was the original title lettering from the first five issues of Vampirella, the most provocative and sexually charged comic from the publishers of Eerie and Creepy. Vampirella‘s concept and stories don’t always bear close examination, though they are better than the terrible movie based on them which was released in the 1990s. But Vampirella did feature some excellent art, including some of the best work of Frank Frazetta, and although I’m not so fond of the title design which was used for most of its run, the original title design was powerful and striking and would make a good basis for a font.

The Vampirella lettering is an interesting example of lettering with an outline which conforms to the countours of the letters, a style particularly popular in horror comics and psychedelic era poster design. I’ve done similar fonts like Hendrix and the effect is excellent for titles where you want characters to overlap and nest with each other. It also has characters offset at different levels relative to the baseline, something which is easy to do when hand lettering, but more challenging in a font. It’s best addressed by having multiple different versions of each character in different positions and kerned and hinted to fit with other likely characters in two-letter combinations.

Work has only just started on the Vampirella font and I’m also looking at some other vintage comic fonts, but it should be finished in time to be a special feature for Halloween.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

September 24, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Design, Fonts, Horror Fonts | Leave a Comment 

Walter Crane on Decorative Pattern

People recognize Walter Crane as a famous book illustrator, but far fewer are aware that he was the philosophical leader of a political movement in the arts in late 19th century Britain, combining aesthetics and socialism and expressing his ideas in his writings promoting the Arts and Crafts movement.

Crane’s essays on aesthetics and politics are collected in several books, including The Claims of Decorative Art which includes several good articles on how art relates to commerce and government. I have to admit to not agreeing with many of Crane’s political beliefs, but his essays do provide interesting food for thought. In his essay “On the Structure and Evolution of Decorative Pattern” he wrote:

“The artist must keep in touch with nature and life; he must keep his eye fresh and his heart open if his work is to touch men and dwell in their memories. And it matters not whether he wield the chisel, the hammer, or the brush, or work at the forge, the carpenter’s bench, the stone-mason’s shed, on the scaffold or in the studio; if he feels his work, if he acquires the skill to make a thing of beauty, he is an artist in the true sense of the word.”

Which sums up the idea behind the Arts and Crafts movement pretty well and touches on some universal truths about art which it is difficult to argue with. If you would like to read some of Crane’s philosophy of art, going far beyond the title of this essay, click on the image to the right to access a PDF facsimile of “On the Structure and Evolution of Decorative Pattern” from The Claims of Decorative Art.

Dave

Rating 4.33 out of 5

September 7, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Walter Crane | Leave a Comment 

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.

Rating 4.00 out of 5

August 28, 2011 | Filed Under Articles | 6 Comments 

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.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

August 15, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Dark Shadows, Design, Font Design, Gothic Fonts, Tim Burton | Leave a Comment 

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.

Rating 4.00 out of 5

August 6, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Sightings | Leave a Comment 

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.

Rating 4.00 out of 5

August 4, 2011 | Filed Under Articles, Dark Shadows, Design, Font Design, Gothic Fonts, Tim Burton | Leave a Comment 

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