TeeFury – Cool Shirts and a Smart Gimmick

My daughter recently turned me on to TeeFury a website that sells original, limited edition t-shirts with a very clever marketing gimmick. It’s worth looking at here because good art and clever marketing are our bread and butter.

The concept of TeeFury is very simple. Artists submit t-shirt designs which they produce and sell at a reasonable price with a 10% payout to the artists. The clever twist is that each shirt is only available for 24 hours and then is never offered again. The limited edition of the shirts and the dedicated marketing for that 24 hours means that every design gets a chance to sink or swim on its merits in a mercilessly short period of time. It’s good experience for the artist and with the relatively low price fans come back again and again, buying shirts as a sort of vote on the designs they like.

Some of the shirts have done very well, selling over 2000 units in a single day. Successful artists then come back and submit new designs, doing what they can to repeat their success, and in some cases doing very well. Several artists have made over $20,000 with multiple shirts even though their share is only $1 per shirt. Obviously this also means that the clever folks who came up with the idea are making even more money, but they do take on all the risk and overhead.

Of course, the frustrating aspect of this for fans is that they never know what shirts are going to get picked and shirts they missed are unavailable after the fact unless the artist prints some for sale later. For the artist the question is whether you want to be at the mercy of the TeeFury staff as far as when or if your shirt gets picked to be featured. It’s kind of a gamble whether it’s worth waiting and hoping for the higher sales TeeFury’s model will produce or the hard self-marketing work and smaller sales over a longer period of time from Etsy or Cafe Press or one of the more traditional alternatives.

The two designs shown here are for the two most recent shirts. Of course, by the time most of you read this neither of them will be available anymore and something new will have come up in the cycle.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

April 11, 2012 | Filed Under Design, Review | Leave a Comment 

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
Read more

Rating 3.50 out of 5

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

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.

Rating 4.50 out of 5

November 12, 2011 | Filed Under Art Collections, Collections, Design, Font Collections, MapMaker Fonts | Leave a Comment 

Dark Shadows Font Preliminary Rendering

With the Dark Shadows movie in the early phases of filming and some production stills (let’s hope they improve the make-up on Depp) already appearing on the web, it’s time to step up work on the Dark Shadows font. At this point I have the basic character design done for a complete set of uppercase and small caps characters plus a partial set of more elaborate initials. All of this is still in hand-drawn form, but it’s at the pont now where I can put characters together to see how they look and move on to rendering them as outlines to make them into a functional font. See the image to the right for what they look like right now. Feedback and suggestions would be most welcome.

Also of vital importance is the name of the font. It’s down to Collinsport, Collinwood and Barnabas. If you want to contribute to the naming decision, vote in the poll below.

Dark Shadows Font Name Poll

Collinsport
Barnabas
Collinwood

Rating 4.00 out of 5

October 7, 2011 | Filed Under Dark Shadows, Design, Font Design, Tim Burton | 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 

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 

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 

A Guide to Lettering by Pedro Lemos

In the past we’ve put together several special ebooks on various aspects of design excerpted from Pedro J. Lemos textbook Applied Arts, including one on Bookbinding and another on Color Harmony. Our new addition to that collection is A Guide to Lettering which looks at the history of letters and how to do basic calligraphy and design of letters for posters or type design.

Guide to Lettering is longer than our previous releases and it is profusely illustrated in both color and black and white. It’s not an advanced book on lettering and type design but it does provide a nice introduction in a way that’s clear and easy to understand.

You can download the ebook HERE in PDF format.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

July 4, 2011 | Filed Under Design, Pedro J. Lemos | 1 Comment 

Beehive Collective

So I’m on vacation with the kids and we happened to stop in to Finelli’s Pizza in Ellsworth, Maine. On the wall in Finelli’s is a mural-style poster of a banner opposing the Free Trade Area of the Ameircas from Beehive Collective, which reminded me that I had intended to give them a plug after seeing their work displayed at The Common Ground Country Fair (AKA Unity Fair) last fall in Unity, Maine. So that’s the context, and here’s the plug.

I don’t agree with 90% of the political ideas espoused by the folks involved in Beehive Collective, but I do admire the work which they do. They are a printing and design collective – a business model which I think has a lot of potential and is underused here in the US – and they do work which is unique and fascinating even if I find some of the political content naive and unappealing. They specialize in printing large posters and banners – and I mean really large. The minimum size printing job they will normally take on is 20 square feet. They also tour the country selling posters and banners and reproduction prints of their works at fairs and art shows, mostly in the northeast and midwest.

What’s particularly interesting about their work is the peculiar design style which they’ve developed in these murals, which are crowded with messages and images which are striking and even disturbing. They’re kind of a combination of Where’s Waldo and the work of Heironymous Bosch, telling a story with multiple little vignettes and images mixed in together in a gigantic maze of information and political statements and allegory and just pure bizarreness. The style of their work owes something to the underground comics of the 60s and also to editorial cartoons of the 19th and early 20th centuries, plus a sold dose of pure paranoid mania. It’s also interesting that they work only in black and white. They are what they call “narrative posters” and every one tells a story, but they are so complicated that it helps to have a guide to explain them, and they do have several pages on their website where they break down the content of the poster and explain the included elements. See this example from their Plan Colombia column-style banner. Or check out the more traditional shaped banner for their Free Trade Area of the Ameircas campaign which they also explain in detail.

They use a lot of interesting hand lettering in their posters and tend towards certain styles which you can also find preserved in our font designs. They seem to like Art Nouveau styles, or maybe they’re just influenced by 1960s concert posters which were heavily influenced by Art Nouveau. You’ll find fonts similar to those they use in our Art Nouveau and Psychedelic Fonts collections. They particularly favor the more topheavy Art Nouveau styles like our Fnchley, Gehenna and Estoril fonts. We may have more fonts along similar lines in a forthcoming collection of fonts which sort of bridge the gap between Art Nouveau and psychedelic styles.

Rating 4.00 out of 5

June 18, 2011 | Filed Under Art Nouveau Fonts, Design, Found Art, Poster Fonts | 1 Comment 

Glastonbury Font Featured in St. Alban’s Alumni Magazine

It may not reach our ideal target audience, but there’s something very flattering about having my work covered in a feature article in my high-school’s alumni magazine. A while you may have seen an article about the development of the Glastonbury font back in the fall of 2009. It was a collaborative project which I undertook for my alma mater, St. Albans School, to provide them with a font to use to do the inscriptions of student names on the walls of the school refectory.

Well, down the road a bit, the St. Albans Bulletin decided to publish a feature on the project. Molly Meinhardt interviewed me by email and also talked to others involved in the project like local wall artist Raea Jean Leinster and the result is a pretty comprehensive look at how the project was done, what went into producing the font and the end results. It’s surprisingly in-depth for something written to appeal to a diverse audience. I’m not sure that many St. Albans graduates are in the design or publishing industries, but I think that they’ll still find the article an entertaining read.

It’s a pretty good bet that few people who visit this site read the St. Albans Bulletin or are StA graduates, so I’ve uploaded the article as a PDF for those who want to read an interesting piece on how a font was created to meet a specific need. Click on the image at the top right to download the PDF of the article.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

May 31, 2011 | Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment 

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