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.
Rudolph Koch Floral Initials
f you wonder where all of our fonts and art come from, we spend a lot of time researching rare books and other sources for the images on which many of them are based. We look for works of historic calligraphy and antique type sample books and classic illustrated works. The research is a big part of what we do and it leads to a lot of great fonts, but it also leaves us with weird leftover stuff. Sometimes we find things which just aren’t enough to make into a product and release in their own right and sometimes we just find surprising odd items we’re not sure what to do with.
ne example of this was when we were searching for examples of calligraphy by German type designer and calligrapher Rudolph Koch. In an online auction we picked up a strange little chaptbook by Koch which was not a collection of calligraphy or type samples, but instead contained a series of beautiful floral illustrations which Koch drew and had tinted. We couldn’t make them into a font and they didn’t really fit with anything else we were doing, so they languished in our library until an opportunity to use them came up when a customer contacted us looking for a set of custom-designed floral initials.
o we took the Koch flowers and combined them with the Terpsichore font and some other design elements and produced a unique set of initials. Originally it was only the handful of initials needed for that project, but eventually we added a full set of the rest of the characters. The result isn’t exactly a font, but it fills the same function as a decorative initials font. It’s just that because the images are in full color you have to insert them as art rather than as type. We think the results are quite nice and an excellent example of how fonts and art can be combined together into something even better.
e’re making the Koch Floral Initials available as part of a mini-package. It includes both the finished initials and the full set of about 20 floral illustrations in their original form for you to use in your own projects. The whole package is only $25 and you can ORDER IT ONLINE.
