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
Arts and Crafts Borders from the Calendar of Golden Thoughts of 1912
The Calendar of Golden Thoughts was published by Barse and Hopkins printing company in 1911. It was a calendar for the year 1912, but it also served as a sampler of their type, printers ornaments and borders. It had a page for every week and each page featured a different decorative border with an inspiring quote in decorative type with ornamental embellishments. It was an attractive example of craft printing of the period, hand assembled bound with tied string and sold packaged in an attractive display box.
The type and borders in the package are very much in the arts and crafts or early art deco style, similar in many respects to the types of designs favored by the Roycroft Arts and Crafts movement in New York in the early 1900s. The type featured in the calendar includes many different styles similar to some of the fonts we’ve done from that period like Valentin, Agravain and Albemarle. In addition to the great samples of early type and ornaments the calendar includes 40 unique borders, all of them created in a two-tone process using mortised cut brass plates. All of them are printed in red and black, but it’s remarkably easy to change the colors using the “select color range” tool in Adobe Photo shop. The style of the border designs is highly varied, from floral styles to some which look moorish to some which are mechanical aspect.
We’ve collected the images from the calendar together into a special package. It includes all 40 borders separated from the text, cleaned up and ready to use. It also includes all the original page images plus a PDF of the complete calendar. You can also download a PDF sampler of the calendar to view all the images.
The complete package can be purchased for $49 from our ONLINE STORE. And through the 10th of February you can get it for $10 off with the coupon code KALENDS.
Historic Borders Collection
One of the latest additions to our phenomenal collection of images is a set of historic borders from the 15th through 19th centuries which exemplify the height of the art of decoration in printed books as it developed over that period. These are all borders which were cut in wood or metal to be set with type and they demonstrate the complexity and diversity of designs during this period in which printing matured and became more sophisticated.
All of the borders and decorative emblems in this special collection were taken from printed books and they have been cleaned up and adapted for use in digital design. They include designs from England and from continental Europe and from well known designers including Erhard Ratdolt, Will Ransom, Walter Teague, Walter Crane and William Morris. If you need borders with historical character you need look no further.
The entire collection is just $49 and can be ordered from our ONLINE STORE and downloaded immediately. You can click on any of the thumbnails below to see the corresponding border in larger size. The borders in the collection are considerably larger and all in very high resolution, suitable for high quality printing.
New Holiday Clip-Art Mini Package
This year, as a special holiday offering we’re releasing a mini-package of seasonal clip-art with images based on mortised advertising cuts from the early 1900s. The images are based on printers oranments which would have originally been sold individually as brass plates to be inserted into a typeset page.
The seasonal images include lots of Santa images, trees, wreaths, bells, candles and all of the images associated with the holiday season, many of them in both monochrome and simple multi-color versions, with a charming vintage look. They are perfect for embellishing holiday cards or making labels for presents. Many even include open space in the design for addresses or names.
The package consists of 9 large-size pages of images, exactly as preserved in the printer’s type sample book from which they are drawn, published over 100 years ago. They are in high-resolution and should be printable with crisp output at fairly large sizes. The mini-package is only $10 and can be ordered online for immediate download from >OUR STORE in plenty of time for the holidays.
Holiday Fonts and Art
hatever holiday you celebrate, it’s probably a time of cards and presents and decorations and parties — that means you’re going to need great fonts and art to add elegance and unique flare to your seasonal projects. The Scriptorium Holiday Fonts and Art collection has the resources you need, including free samples and shareware demos, as well as a selection of holiday fonts and unique seasonal art which it took us years to collect.
e’ve recently combined our Holiday package into a single package and added a number of new fonts and images, all for a lower price than we were charging for our older packages. You get lots of holiday fonts and art to fit every taste, at a very reasonable price. In addition, we’ve got several shareware fonts for you to try out for a free evaluation, plus some great sample art. To try them out, see the bottom of this page.
he newest fonts added to our Holiday Fonts and Art collection include the Scurlock and Asrafel fonts plus the new Holiday Borders dingbat font which is featured as a free demo at the bottom of this page and also the extraordinary Rudolfo font package including Rudolfo Swash.
e’ve also added some new graphic material including some specialized borders, some color decorative initials (featured on this page) and a selection of new art, including pieces by several pre-raphaelite and renaissance period artists. These new images are pretty extraordinary.
Other images in the collection include all of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Howard Pyle’s illustrations from his story Travels of the Soul, plus art by Rackham, Rossetti, Nielsen, Dulac, Mucha, Wyeth and others. Only a small portion of the images are sampled on this page. Several bonus borders by Pyle are also included. Other recent additions to the collection include some seasonal Pre-Raphaelite images by Millais, Leyton and Hunt.
The new release of the collection now includes a total of 21 fonts, plus scores of great images and useful graphics. Fonts include everything from art fonts to decorative initials to elaborate text and titling styles.<
Like all of our font and art CDs, this package can be ordered online from our ORDERING site, or you can order by phone from 1-800-797-8973 (01-512-656-8011).
You’ll find a lot of these images and fonts in use on this site. This should give you some idea what you can do with them. In addition, to give you an even better idea of the unique quality of our fonts and graphics, we’ve got several demo items you can try out, including a demo version of our recently released Holiday Borders font, which is available exclusively on this CD. Just click on the appropriate button below each font sample to download a shareware demo version to try out.
For those of you doing your own Christmas design work, here’s a special pallette which you can open in Photoshop or other art programs and access with the sampling tool. It includes a variety of special colors which we think are particularly seasonal.
And finally, here’s a great Christmas themed page border with holly and candles and other good things. This graphic was found in an old issue of St. Nicholas children’s magazine from the early part of this century. Just click on the sample image to the right below to download the large size image.
As a special feature we’ve put together some ideas on how to design your own holiday cards. Just CLICK HERE for all the details.
You can order the complete package for download or delivery on CD for just $79 from our ONLINE STORE.
CELTIC CHRISTMAS?
One of the popular trends we’ve seen rcently s an interest in Celtic art and ornament as a theme for Christmas cards and decoration. We’ve got a special page devoted to Celtic fonts and art, which has some excellent resources if you want to give your holidays a Celtic look. Click here to visit our Celtic page: CELTIC FONTS & ART.
Illuminated Initials from Early Manuscripts
In the mid-19th century Owen Jones undertook to catalog historic design and decoration in phenomenal detail and with exacting thoroughness in a series of beautifully illustrated books. The most famous of these is his Grammar of Ornament, which provides an overview of design and ornament from ancient times to the Renaissance. His next most notable work on historic design is his collection of Illuminated Initials from Early Manuscripts, a magnificent work on historic calligraphy and illumination which we are now making available in digital form, prepared with the same kind of care and attention to detail as our digital edition of the Grammar of Ornament.
The collection consists of all the original illustrations in the Jones book, including hundreds of initials and decorative calligraphic letters. It includes a large selection of ornate initials from different historic periods, plus several complete historic calligraphic alphabets and a selection of decorative borders and embellishments. The designs are extraordinarily detailed with brilliant colors and include examples of illumination from the early medieval period through the gothic period of the high middle ages, including outstanding Celtic, Gothic and Frankish styles.
You can see some samples of individual initials of several different styles here, or click on the sample page to the right to download a PDF with reduced-size versions of all the pages from the original book. The PDF can give you a good idea of the content of the collection, but not the quality of the images in the full package, which are in high resolution and large size with vivid colors and painstaking digital clean-up and color adjustment. These are great examples of the highly detailed, full-color initials which look great, but just can’t normally be turned into fonts. With a few exceptions, as the package also includes a bonus – two original fonts based on alphabets from the collection, Alcuin and Leodegar.
The complete Illuminated Initials from Early Manuscripts collection is available for purchase online and can be downloaded or delivered on CD for just $69 from our ONLINE STORE.
MapMaker Collection
Making functional and attractive maps is a very specialized skill, prized by game designers, roleplayers and artists. To make exceptional maps, you need to have the right tools. Our MapMaker font and art package provide the fonts, textures and emblems which make drawing floorplans and developing stylish world and regional maps a breeze. Our map resources are based on the designs of classic cartographers like Abraham Ortelius and Johan Hondius give your maps a unique antique look which will inspire the imagination.
The core of the collection is the extraordinary collection of more than fifteen original fonts specially created for cartographic design. They include fonts for mapping terrain, fonts of complete building plans, fonts for designing buildings and a selection of cartographic lettering fonts.
Basilica is a font of architectural elements fordesigning floorplans of churches, castles, houses and other buildings. It includes a variety of wall thicknesses, windows, doors, stairs and other essential pieces which you can easily assemble in any graphics or desktop publishing program to create impressive, easy to understand layouts for anything from a hut to a palace to a house by house map of a city.
The characters in Ortelius can be combined to make traditional geographical maps in an antique style. They include segments of coastline and rivers which can be combined in thousands of different patterns, plus city, town and fortification emblems, terrain symbols, compass symbols and everything else you need for a high-quality map of your world or key parts of it.
Our Landscape fonts are a pair of fonts containing landscape symbols, images and textures ideal for adding details to your maps and plans, such as trees, rocks, terrain features and other important elements of the environment. It’s excellent for architectural plans and building layouts.
Cityscape is mainly a decorative font, but it can add flair to your maps and plans. Each character is the silhouette of a building and they can be combined to create a complete panorama of a city. Samarkand is a decorative building silhouette font like Cityscape, but with a middle eastern theme. It includes mosques and towers and all the elements of a medieval islamic city.
Our three floorplan fonts include Temples, Castles and Houses. Each font includes a large selection of complete building floorplans which you can access with a few key clicks. Plans include original designs and notable historic buildings, mostly medieval and renaissance designs. The floorplans of temples, churches and cathedrals are particularly impressive.
The package also includes a selection of fonts for doing the titles and labels on your maps, plus several select highly decorative cartographic calligraphy fonts. The six main title fonts were selected for readability and for their historical accuracy for the era of exploration.
Brandywine is based on the lettering of Howard Pyle and is very clear and readable in small sizes, despite having a hand-drawn look. Queensland is a bold, hand-drawn italic font ideal for titles and captions. Windlass is a bold titling font with an antique look ideal for headings and large captions. In some of the alternate character locations it includes decorative map elements with a pirate theme. Buccaneer is based on hand lettering by Howard Pyle for his Book of Pirates. Walsingham is very similar to the lettering style favored by 16th century English mapmakers. Pavane is similar to the style of continental mapmakers like Abraham Ortelius. All six fonts are versatile and are similar to typefaces and lettering styles used on historical maps of the 15th and 16th centuries. Also featured in the package are the new fonts Platthand, John Speed and Hexmap.
The LITE version of the package includes just the fonts for only $59. The PLUS version includes all the fonts, plus a large selection of color design elements and over a hundred antique maps for only $89. The current release is the new 5th edition of the package. Just ORDER ONLINE. You can also order it in a discounted combo package with the Colonial Fonts for just $129 and save $20.
To get an idea of what our MapMaker fonts are like, try out the demo version of our Floorplan fonts. It combines selected floorplans from all three of our Floorplan fonts. You might also want to check out a set of sample maps or try our map design tutorial.
Special Arthur Rackham Mini Package
We’ve been doing an awful lot with Walter Crane recently, but sort of neglecting one of his great contemporaries who has been a mainstay of our collection in the past, Arthur Rackham. Rackham was arguably the greatest illustrator of his era and certainly one of the highest paid. He is also certainly the best remembered and most widely imitated today. Popular current artists like Brian Froud and Charles Vess owe him a great deal and acknowledge his role in laying the groundwork for the modern tradition of fantasy and folklore illustration.
Our Rackham Fonts and Art Collection is great, but it is still far from complete considering how prolific he was. So we’re slowly incorporating more material. One unusual and extremely rare item has just been processed and is now available, a collection of color and black and white illustrations from the 1910 edition of Rackham’s illustration of Greek myths titled Greek Heroes. This is a unique and special work because Rackham worked outside of his typical illustration style and the color pieces in particular look very different from what we’re used to from Rackham – much more realistic and less stylized. The black and white pieces are more typical of his other work. Themes covered include the labors of Hercules, the tale of Jason and the Argonauts and the story of Perseus.
It’s also a relatively small set of high quality illustrations – what would be considered a minor work when compared to some of his other massive and elaborate projects like his illustrations for Wagner’s Ring Saga. But however minor it is, it’s also very rare and the illustrations are almost never seen elsewhere and they are also powerful and visually striking, with an unusual color palette of browns and reds which Rackham used relatively infrequently.
The set of 12 high resolution illustrations from Greek Heroes (4 color, 8 black and white) has already been added to our Rackham Fonts and Art Collection, so if you order that package now it will be included. Alternatively you can also purchase the mini-collection separately for just $8 and you can order it and download it directly from our ONLINE STORE.
Walter Crane Decorations Mini-Package
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Even when writing essays on socialism and the philosophy of art, Walter Crane was incapable of resisting an opportunity to add some decoration. In his book The Claims of Decorative Art, Crane embellished each chapter with an intricate decorative header featuring neoclassical and mythological scenes in his usual meticulous and detailed style.
We’ve taken all of the decorations from the book and collected them together into a special mini-package with 22 images. They’re perfect for incorporating into your own designs or decorating a document or web page. You can see some examples to the right and you can ORDER the package for only $15 online and download it right away. BUY PACKAGE |
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Walter Crane’s The Golden Primer
Illustrated books teaching young children how to read were a staple of 19th century education, and Walter Crane was famous for his alphabet books as well as books like The Golden Primer which were designed to teach vocabulary to slightly older children through the use of rhymes and images.
The Golden Primer is one of Crane’s harder to find works. It has not been extensively reprinted and original editions are scarce and highly collectible. We acquired a copy several years ago and in our ongoing development of resources based on Crane’s work we have now created high-quality digital versions of all of the highly decorative illustrated plates in the book.
We’ve made this into a neat little collection with a set of 33 images ready to be used for your design projects. In addition to the 26 color illustrations the package includes Crane’s black and white decorations and the four sample alphabets included for teaching the young readers how to write in different styles.
You can get the full package from our online store at a special price of just $29 with an immediate download. Just CLICK HERE
For a preview of the package, they the PDF Version which includes lower resolution versions of all the color images, but not the black and white decorations or alphabet designs.
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.
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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.
