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.
April Fools Highlights
Every year we try to amuse with some sort of April Fools prank. This year visitors to the site were first greeted by what looked like a hacker takeover, a modest joke, 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.
2012 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
In Development: Crane Initials Font
One of our upcoming fonts is the result of an interesting project, developing original initials based on designs by Walter Crane. We recently acquired an obscure edition of French tales of Reynard the Fox illustrated by Crane with a series of square black and white illustrations of forest animals.
They were just the right size and shape for the backgrounds of decorative initials characters, so we are adapting them to be the basis of a new decorative initials font with the letter forms provided by our Crane Gothic font. The initial character designs look excellent and the font should work really nicely in conjunction with our other Walter Crane fonts.
Look for the new font to be released soon.
Recreating the Django Font
Since there seemed to be some real interest in seeing a fully developed font similar to the one used for the titles for the new Tarantino movie Django Unchained, I decided to take it on as a project. This kind of project always involves a lot of research, and in the process I learned more about Django than I ever expected to.
The new Tarantino film draws on a legacy of an entire genre of Django films with a long history which goes back to the original 1966 Django directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Franco Nero. It was one of the most successful early spaghetti westerns and spawned over 30 unofficial sequels, including A Few Dollars for Django, a quick ripoff which appeared in the same year as the original, A Coffin for Django (1968) and Viva Django (1971) which both starred Terrence Hill, whose more famous Trinity films are very much in the Django tradition. The only official sequel was Django Strikes Again which has a script by Corbucci and in which Nero reprises his role 20 years later. Tarantino’s Django Unchained would be most accurately classed as a tribute to the entire Django genre, borrowing from many different films, including the original Django and They Call Me Trinity. Interestingly, it’s not the first first Django tribute film Tarantino has been involved in. He appeared as an actor in Takeshi Miike’s Japanese tribute to the Django genre, Sukiyaki Western Django in 2007. There were many other Django films and Django ripoffs and they became so iconic that in Italy and Japan the name Django came to be applied to the entire genre of spaghetti westerns.
I had originally thought that I’d have to go to the Tarantino film for source material for a font, but as it turns out, the main font Tarantino uses in the title and on the posters for his film is actually derived from hand lettered titles in the original Django. It’s actually one of several lettering styles used in the trailer and also for the main titles in the film itself. If you wait through most of the scenes in the trailer, it’s the lettering used for the names of the cast at the end, shown in a mustard color rather than the orangy red in the Tarantino film. It’s also the style used in the titles of the film itself, but the quality of the lettering in the trailer is much more consistent than in the film. The facts that the style of the titles predates the Tarantino film and that it was originally hand lettered actually add a lot of appeal to the project, because it makes it a much more interesting and original work of research and recreation.
You can watch the trailer for the original Django above and to the right. If you want to see the whole film you can find it on IMDB and most of the other Django films are on YouTube if you look around for them.
The next step is taking the images of the letters in the trailer and picking the best examples and expanding them into a full character set, using our Madding font as a guide for the general weight and shape of the characters.
Making Maps with the MapMaker Package
This is a step by step guide to designing a small map using the elements and fonts of the MapMaker package. This tutorial was done using Adobe Photoshop, but the same tools and commands are available in every good graphics program, including less expensive ones like PaintShopPro and ColorIt.
 To start your map off, use the text tool to type in a piece of coastline that you like using the Ortelius font. |
 Continue to use the text tool to pick additional coastal outlines and add them to your map, rotating or repositioning them as needed to form the shape you want. Do this until you have made a complete coastline. |
 In this case we’ve completed our coastline with 7 different coastal outline characters from Ortelius to form a simple island. |
 Using the Magic Wand tool, click inside the island (or on the landward side of your coastline). Open the Elements1.jpg image in your MapMaker folder and use the Select tool to select a square area of the background texture you like. Use the Define Pattern option to make this into a pattern. Return to your working map and use the Fill command to fill the area you selected with the Magic Want with this pattern. |
 While that land area is still selected, use a Beveling tool to add a colored bevel inside the coastline to help define the area. This is a technique used universally in hand-tinted antique maps, and works very nicely. |
 Use the magic wand on the sea area of the map and repeat the process you just used, going to the Elements2.jpg file to get a sea pattern you like and using it to fill the area. |
 While the sea area is still selected use the Bevel tool to add a blue or purplish bevel on the seaward side of your coastline. You might use the sampling tool to pick an appropriate shade of blue from the sea texture you used. |
 Now, go back to the Elements1.jpg file and start importing terrain features. You can do this by selecting a box around the bits you want, pasting them into a new file, using the Magic Wand to select everything around them and the Inverse command to switch your selection to the objects instead. Then copy them and paste them into your map. Here we added a few mountains first. |
 Repeating the process in the previous steb we now add some trees. |
 Continuing that process we now also add a town. |
 Now we do the same thing to add features to the se areas, following the process above using the Elements2.jpg file we import a Sea Horse. |
 Next we add a compass – a key element of any antique map. |
 Finally we add a cartouche in which we will later put our map’s title. |
 Now we move on to adding text labels to the map using the type tool. For the label on the sea area we select the Platthand font and title the sea area The Sea of Dreams. |
 Next, because our island is small and already crowded with terrain, we use the Text tool to add the island’s name in the sea next to it using the Brandywine font. |
 There isn’t enough room to add the town name in the land area of the island, so we add it overlapping the coastline and into the sea using the Walsingham font. Then, so that it doesn’t get too muddled, while the type is still selected we use the Bevel tool to add a 2 pixel buff-colored bevel around the type to help set it apart from the background. This is almost invisible on these sample images, but really makes a difference in print. |
 Our final text goes in the cartouche, which usually has a map title or description, sometimes along with a designer credit and date. In this case we added a small description using the buccaneer font. |
 Finally we finish the map off by adding a darker colored frame around the outside, smaller in thickness than the outer bevel of the sea area to give the border a layered look. Now our map is finished. |
You can get more information about or MapMaker package of fonts and grapics on our MapMaker Page and order it for immediate download.
Children of the Damned
With Halloween looming, thoughts naturally turn to issues of horror and to classic horror films, particularly the creative title design and unique lettering which some of these classics feature in their titles, but even more especially in their preview trailers. YouTube is a great resource for these trailers, including many for films which are themselves very hard to find. Trailers are great design inspiration, because they boil down a film to its most dramatic images and older trailers include extensive descriptive titles in very dramatic styles.
Expectation of trick or treating kids naturally brings to mind the broader topic of creepy children, which leads the mind naturally to the classic film Village of the Damned and its arguably superior sequel Children of the Damned. Some people like the original and others prefer the sequel, but both of these classic British films based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos are seminal examples of the “alien kids with psychic powers” sub-genre of Science Fiction.
There’s something uniquely British about these films and the script, acting and directing are all outstanding. Plus one nice development is that a lot of these older films are now available for viewing for free on YouTube, including both Children of the Damned and the original Village of the Damned. You can also watch the John Carpenter remake from 1995 for #2.99 but despite an interesting cast it can’t hold a candle to the originals.
Of course, for our purposes the trailer is more of a resource, and as you can see from the accompanying graphics it includes a lot of examples of an unusual title alphabet design which would be pretty easy to convert into a unique font. The titles from Village of the Damned aren’t that interesting, but those featured in Children of the Damned are really eyecatching with a bold geometric look which typefies the type of high-impact design popular in 1960s shock cinema. I’ve taken stills from the trailer and have added them to the archive of design resources, so don’t be surprised to see a font based on it down the road.
For a look at how we make fonts from sources like movie titles see our article on designing the Captain Kidd font.
A Special Offer on Our Font Club
As a special offer to round out the fall, 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 the end of Novmber 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. 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.
Desktop Publishing on a Budget
Our customers include a lot of novices in the area of graphic design who may not be well prepared to work with images and fonts effectively and often lack basic software appropriate for desktop publishing and graphic design. Everyone seems to have Microsoft Word, but it just doesn’t do the job when it comes to even fairly simple integration of fonts and graphics in an attractive publication design.who want to use our fonts and graphics but don’t have a background in desktop publishing or graphic design or the need for advanced software like Adobe Creative Suite. There are some things which you just can’t do if you’re a novice at computer design and limited to programs like Microsoft Word.
Even fairly basic design projects require either an advanced image editor or some sort of desktop publishing software. The key break point where a text-oriented program like Microsoft Word comes up short for anything but the most basic design projects, is in not facilitating the easy manipulation and positioning of images. For example, to use the many borders in our collections you need to be able to resize and reposition them and most importantly superimpose type on them, and you just can’t do that practically in Microsoft Word which is not designed to handle complex two-dimensional manipulation of text and images.
In the past this has been a real problem because high end graphics or design programs have been prohibitively expensive and there have been few reasonably priced alternatives. For OSX users this has changed with the advent of the App Store. The pricing practices which became common with the App Store for the iPhone and iPad have carried over to OSX and this has brought down the price of many applications and even led to creative pricing solutions from the highest end software publishers like Adobe.
For many users the learning curve is less steep and needs are easiest to meet with desktop publishing software, but with premiere packages like InDesign or QuarkXPress priced around $700 they are not a realistic purchase option for novice or casual users, so what do you do if you just want to design a cool newsletter or invitation or the occasional brochure or business card? Here are three options which may fit your needs and let you do just about anything you would want to in document design, and one of these options is bound to fit the needs of any user from the novice to the professional and at a very reasonable price.
Swift Publisher 3.0
BeLight Software’s latest version of Swift Publisher is a strong entry-level desktop publishing application which offers pretty much everything a novice user needs for typical projects like designing invitations or holiday cards or simple brochures, and even includes templates for many of these projects to help out beginners right out of the box. It includes most of the features you would find in a higher end design application like the ability to flow text from page to page, multiple layers, scaling images and some control over the spacing and formatting of text, though not as much as some users might want.
The interface is relatively simple and designed for ease of use, but it is also very much oriented towards beginning users and focused on using templates rather than doing custom designs. This is good for those with no experience, but for more experienced users it may prove somewhat frustrating. The learning curve is very easy for simple projects, but for more advanced uses it may seem cumbersome and the focus on templates may become very limiting. But if you just have a flyer or simple card to do Swift Publisher will start you off ahead of the game and allow someone with very little experience to produce a professional-looking product very quickly.
At just $19.99 the entry cost is very low, just where you want it to be for the casual user.
Creator Express
Creator Express has actually been around for a very long time as a competitor to high end programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress, but it never really found the same status in the marketplace. This latest version has been released through the App Store at a much more reasonable price and may find its market in that environment, as a lower-priced alternative for publishing professionals in small businesses.
Creator Express is less of a beginner application than some users may want, but offers high end features which many will find useful. The interface is fairly complex, but will be familiar to those who have used Adobe products. It is very similar to what you find in PhotoShop or InDesgn, though somewhat simpler than the latter. It is tool palette driven and oriented towards blank-canvas design, assuming that the user has some idea what they want to do and how to use the tools. It is a full-featured design package with strong tools for controlling shapes, colors, images and also text. It’s really very reminiscent of earlier versions of some Adobe products, particularly PageMaker which was the predecessor of InDesign. For someone like me it was a snap to use because it was just like stepping back a couple of years and working with programs with which I’ve been very familiar for a long time.
It also offers some very nice higher-end features like highly customizable shapes in which you can insert images, drawing tools, texture tools, sophisticated gradients and text manipulation tools, including adapting texts to paths with a tool which may be superior to the equivalent tool in Adobe Photoshop.
Creator Express is a great alternative for those with some experience who want to do higher-end design work, but it may be harder for novices to just pick up and use out of the box. AT $29.99 the price is outstanding for the quality and versatility of the product.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe’s approach to the problem of providing advanced software at a reasonable price is the innovative idea of the the Creative Cloud, which essentially lets you rent a very expensive program for a finite period of time, accessing key components through their server and never actually owning it as a complete piece of software resident on your computer. This is new technology and it may have shortcomings based on your internet speed and the capabilities of your computer, but cloud integration is being pushed very heavily by Apple and if you have a good DSL or Cable internet connection this may be a viable option for you. It allows you to access high-end programs for a monthly fee, starting as low as $19.99 a month for a single program like InDesign or Photoshop and at a still reasonable $49.99 a month for the full Creative Suite with InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat and more. This program includes a free 30-day trial and lets you save a lot of money if you just have the occasional project to work on. The pricing is carefully structured so that if you are likely to use the software for two years or more then you’ll be better off purchasing the full version rather than using cloud access. These are the best programs of their sort available, setting the industry standard, and the ability to access the latest versions for a short term at a low price is a major market innovation. Adobe’s main competitor in Desktop Publishing is QuarkXPress and though it is arguably superior to InDesign it is not available in any form other than as the full installed package for $849.
Fun With Typeshow
One of the amusing things about Typeshow, our new font preview tool, is that it logs what people type in as their sample text. This provides an interesting insight into how it is being used and the personalities of the users.
The number one thing people seem to want a sample of is their name – in every possible typeface. Is this a sign of ego gone mad or can they just not think of anything else to say? Sometimes what they enter can be helpful. The large number of samples of the names of churches suggests that we should prioritize putting gothic and black letter fonts into the Typeshow database.
But by far the most informative thing in the log was the person who typed in “this type finder sucks” and sampled it in 30 different typefaces. Apparently it never dawned on him that Typeshow is NOT a typefinder. It’s a type sampling tool. If you want to find a font, use the thematic links found our menus. You go to Typeshow once you’ve narrowed down your font selection and want to see specific samples, though it can be fun to just browse through fonts in Typeshow. I would have thought that was obvious, but apparently not.
Winning Votes with the Right Visual Cues
It’s election season again and as some of you may remember, I’m a student of political signage. I wrote an article two years ago on political sign design which got a lot of attention and got me interviewed by the New York Times.
One of my theories in that article was that there were certain color combinations and stylistic elements which identified political inclinations in a way more subtle and perhaps more effective on a subconscious level than simple party affiliation. In particular I identified a specific design style which uses purple and green and a wavy white dividing line as a way of communicating to voters in a non-partisan election that a particular candidate embraces an environmentalist agenda and ideas like “smart growth.” As an example I included the sign used by a city council candidate in California (shown to the right), though I have seen a number of others which follow the same model.
In our recent municipal election here in Austin I saw a demonstration of how effective these visual cues are in political advertising. Austin is a city totally dominated by a small left-leaning political elite which believes in the ideas of smart growth and green cities – moving people downtown and into high-rise condos instead of suburban homes, discouraging the use of cars, expanding mass transit, strong environmental regulation and green energy. It’s an environment in which conservative candidates and Republicans usually do very poorly, rarely getting more than a third of the vote in a city council election.
Austin municipal elections are non-partisan, but engaged voters usually find out the political leanings and history of the candidates. Yet in this recent election we saw a known Republican candidate named Laura Pressley come within a few points of defeating a Democrat incumbent. The campaign had a variety of strengths, but I think one of the factors in Pressley substantially outperforming other Republicans was her choice of sign design. As you can see from these images, she adopted a design which was directly out of the green candidate playbook and very similar to the Lawson sign I had previously used as an example.
I suspect that when voters from the wealthy left-leaning neighborhoods of central Austin went to the polls, instead of remembering rumors that Pressley was a Republican, they remembered the look of her signs and that visual cue influenced enough of them to vote for her that she came surprisingly close to winning. Picking that sign design was a smart move. Maybe someone on her campaign read my article from 2010.
Vintage Postcards at Voices West
While working on a design project for a local group here in Texas I ran across an interesting website with a really unusual collection of images of vintage postcards. Vintage postcards in general have always been an interest, but this collection is unusual because the cards are selected on an unusual basis. They’re all postcards which include the lyrics of classic cowboy songs.
The site is Voices West, and the collection of hundreds of vintage postcard images is really outstanding. The quality of the artwork is uneven and a lot of the songs are pretty awful. But in among the collection are some real artistic gems, especially if you like western themed art. Take a few minutes to check it out.
