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.
Arthur Rackham’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
In 1906 legendary illustrator Arthur Rackham was commissioned to illustrate J. M. Barrie’s prequel to his play Peter Pan. The standard edition features 10 original illustrations, but there was also a very limited edition with 40 additional illustrations which is now extremely rare. Remarkably the tipped in plates are included as an appendix to the regular book consisting of nothing but a portfolio of illustrations separate from the text.
We have collected together and digitized high resolution versions of all of the illustrations in that extended edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens which includes some of Arthur Rackhamn’s most fascinating fairy illustrations and a remarkable diversity of themes. These are examples of Rackham’s best work at the absolute height of his talents. The number and quality of these illustrations is unexcelled.
You can order the complete illustration set from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens for just $59 and you can preview all of the images below. To order now and download the package immediately, just go to our ONLINE STORE and follow the instructions. It’s a fairly large download, but manageable with a high speed connection. All of the illustrations are in high resolution and suitable for printing, with a license allowing their use within our standard restrictions.
The Art of Eleanor Brickdale
Eleanor Fortesque Brickdale was one of the great illustrators of the later Victorian era, even though she is not as well known as some of her male contemporaries. She was strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites like Waterhouse and Millais, and studied with Lord Leighton. Her work also shows the influence of the Art Nouveau period and even the Impressionists, but it remains unique in its combination of modern and classical elements and its extraordinary technical excellence.
Brickdale’s illustrations have many portrait-like qualities, and while they have some similarity in the formal poses and rich color to the work of Sir William Russell Flint, her subjects personalities shine through in a way which Flint’s work never achieved. She also gave many of her images a faux-medieval look with elaborate stylized backgrounds and even painted text frames and decorations. She was particularly adept with images of winged angels and spirits which appear in many of her works.
This new, expanded version of our Brickdale collection draws on all of her major works and includes illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Browning’s Dramatis Personae, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and a number of other works. Her interpretations of these classic poems of the Victorian and Romantic eras bring to life characters like Sir Lancelot and the Pied Piper in a style which is unique and entrancing. Her work is particularly characterized by the brilliant, lively colors, realistic faces and depictions of angelic figures amid everyday life.
Our Eleanore Brickdale package is available for only $69 and includes a over 100 full-color illustrations in high resolution suitable for use in print, as well as bonus content, including a large selection of black and white borders, marginalia and decorations. As with all of our art packages the images are licensed for you to use in your designs and projects. If you have the older release of the package you can upgrade to the current version for just $25.
The easiest way to get this package is to order it online. To order online, just CLICK HERE .
If you like the Eleanor Brickdale colleciton, you might also like the art of the Pre-Raphaelites and Sir William Russell Flint, who come from the same time period and are similar in style. Just click here to check out the FLINT page or take a look at PRE-RAPHAELITE page instead.
Numi Tea Featuring Rackham Font
We often feature products which use our fonts in their packaging or content, but most of the time those are printed products like books and games. One very different example of our fonts in use which we found recently was in the packaging of Numi brand teas, which have been using our Rackham font as their logo font for about about a decade. Numi sells a wide variety of high-end specialty teas and is carried through stores like Whole Foods and also online at Amazon and other retailers.
The Rackham font is based on hand lettering by Arthur Rackham, from a style he used extensively in designing titles and frontispieces for many of his illustrated books. The font is great for unusual looking titles, with caps and custom small caps. It’s one of several fonts in our Rackham Fonts and Art Package which also includes Rackham Italic, a companion style which goes with the original Rackham font.
Walter Crane Initials and Ornaments
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It has taken a lot of hours of development, but we finally have our promised Walter Crane Initials font. Or should I say FOUR fonts, because in the process of developing the font it turned out that we ended up with more than we bargained for. One reason that there are four fonts is that there was so much material to work with, drawing mainly from Crane’s decorations for Reynard the Fox. The other reason is that the initials turned out to require such complex outlines that we couldn’t put more than 26 characters in a single font file so we had to break them up. We also ended up with both a set of 52 initials and also two more fonts of just the original ornaments used for the initials, plus some additional ornaments which didn’t fit the format.
The basis of the characters is a set of detailed woodcut animal images taken from the characters in the classic French fairytale of Reynard the Fox, including foxes, bears, badgers, lions, stags, snakes and birds. Some of the images are even scenes with multiple animals. These are included in their original form in the ornaments fonts, but in the initials they have been combined with the letters from our Crane Gothic font as reversed text which stands out nicely but also integrates well with the background images.
All four of the fonts come together in a consolidated package at a special price, plus the package also includes several decorative border images from the book as a bonus. All of this together is just $29, an extraordinary price for such an unusual set of fonts. You can order the package from our ONLINE STORE. You can also download and try out the DEMO FONT with a limited character set drawn from all the different fonts.
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.
Constructivist Fonts Package
Our first new release for 2013 is our collection of Constructivist Fonts based on poster lettering from the early post-revolutionary period in Russia, including designs based on the styles of famous designers of the period like Alexander Rodchenko, Mikhail Vrubel and Sergei Eisenstein. These are typical of the movement which led to Soviet Realism and which influenced design around the world in the 1920s and 1930s. We may disagree with the political ideology of the era, but the lasting influence of these visionary artists can’t be ignored.
While we would never support or endorse an inhumane political system like Communism, especially given our principle’s experience living in Russia during the soviet era, there is an undeniable power to the design ideas which came out of the early days of communism and we hope that people will take those strong ideas and put them to better uses and thereby redeem the work of artists like Rodchenko and Eisenstein.
The package includes six original fonts you won’t find anywhere else – Eisenstein, Rodchenko, Vrubel, Krasny Mir, Death Ray and Structura. They all include full English-language character sets. Complete Cyrillic versions of the fonts will be made available in a later release. All together this font set will give you everything you need to recreate the Constructivist style in poster lettering.
The collection is priced at $49, but as a special introductory offer use the coupon code PETROGRAD to get $10 off the price when you order in our ONLINE STORE.
Katherine Cameron King Arthur’s Knights
We’ve released several mini-packages of art by early 20th century illustrator Katherine Cameron, including her illustrated Ballads and Tanglewood Tales. Cameron is not terribly well known, but her illustrations have a romantic quality which is very appealing.
We’re now adding to our Cameron collection another set of illustrations from the Stories of King Arthur’s Knights. These were originally acquired to be part of our long-awaited Arthurian Fonts and Art Package, but while that is being completed, we’re making the eight-image set available at a special price of $5 as a mini-package. We’re also offering a special deal on all of our Cameron illustrations from the three mini-packages for $12 together. The images include classic Arthurian scenes like the Lilly Maid of Astalot, Percivasl, Sir Galahad and Lady Lionors.
You can see samples of the illustrations from the Arthurian Tales below and you can order the mini-package from our ONLINE STORE or get the CAMERON COMBO.
Owen Jones “The Preacher” Package
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One of Owen Jones most interesting illuminated books is his 1849 edition of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes published under the title The Preacher, consisting of 35 hand-colored, fully illuminated pages. It is one of the most poetic and most often quoted sections of the Bible, presented here in a somewhat modernized text of the King James version.
“Vanity of vanities saith the Preacher. Vanity of vanities all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun. One generation passeth away, another generation cometh: but the Earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth towards the south, and turneth about toward the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.”
Possibly an ironic chocie of verses for a work so lavishly decorated that it might be considered vain.
Stylistically the design is similar to Jones’ illustrated edition of Gray’s Elegy with similar lettering and foliage motifs. But unlike Gray’s Elegy which features a limited set of standardized page frames, each page in The Preacher is a completely unique design with custom decoration tailored to the text. This makes it more challenging to extract elements for use in other projects, but we have preserved all the complete pages as well as selected decorative elements and usable pages. Also included in the package is a complete high-quality ebook of The Preacher and digitally cleaned and corrected copies of all the pages in high resolution.
There are also design elements in common with Jones’ Illustrated Initials from Early Manuscripts, particularly some of the highly intricate feathery design embellishments accompanying the illuminated capital letters. The fascination with this sort of illumination is a peculiar characteristic of Jones’ work and it is shown off to extraordinary effect in The Preacher.
You can download a PDF preview of selected pages from The Preacher to take a look at selected illuminations. The package also comes with the complete ebook of The Preacher in PDF format. The complete package can be ordered for just $49 from our ONLINE STORE and downloaded right away. We also now offer a combined package of all of our current Owen Jones collections at a substantial discount.
New Font: Diomedes
| Once again we are calling on the classic early 20th century lettering work of J. M. Bergling to produce a new font with a timeless look which combines elements of text and titling styles for a versatile and elegant effect. Diomedes includes a full set of upper and lower case characters plus an interesting selection of alternative lower case characters with decorative elements. It’s great for making web buttons or designing greeting cards or doing book chapter titles.
You can try the DEMO version of Diomedes for free. The demo has a limited character set, but you can still get a good feel for how the font works. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. You now also have the option of using our new type preview tool to view custom samples of text in this font. |
 
BUY NOWTRY DEMO
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Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Bouquet
We’ve done a lot of work with books designed and illustrated by Walter Crane. Two of the first we did were The Baby’s Own Aesop and The Baby’s Opera. Those two are part of a trilogy of small-format children’s books which Crane designed about the same time and the third of that set is The Baby’s Bouquet, which is a song book with a lot of familiar songs in it, similar to Pan Pipes and The Baby’s Opera.
The Baby’s Bouquet combines decorative borders on the pages with music and full-page illustrations for a total of 56 beautiful illustrated pages. The themes are childhood and bucolic scenes, featuring humorous vignettes and scenes appropriate to the musical content. The images are all high resolution and digitally cleaned up and color corrected to make them suitable for print or web use. As with all of our art packages they are licensed for you to use in your own design projects. To get an idea of the contents take a look at the samples below or the video preview above.
You can order The Baby’s Boquet and download it immediately for $39 from our ONLINE STORE or you can purchase the whole set of triplets and get it in combination with The Baby’s Opera and The Baby’s Own Aesop for a discounted combined price of just $89, also in OUR STORE.
