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.
Featured Font: Bilitis
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Bilitis is an original “brush script” style font we designed for a project back in 1998 and released then with some success. It has a strong visual appeal with rough hewn character forms which are very unusual. In this new release we’ve also added a larger selection of alternate character forms and ligatures to add more variety if you want to explore the extended character set. As a script which doesn’t have too much of a refined and elegant look it’s a nice alternative style to have in your collection.
The demo version of Bilitis can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
New Font: Escargot
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Escargot is based on lettering from the cover of an early pulp novel I came across a couple of months ago. It’s a strong example of a distinctive style of sign and poster lettering from the 1930, characterized by super high contrast between the weighting on the left and right sides of the character. It’s a style particularly identified with art deco design, and variations of it can be found all over the place in period design, on movie marquis, electronic products and logos. It’s actually similar to the base character designs of which a much more ornate variant is used in the forthcoming movie version of The Great Gatsby. The name was picked for a couple of odd reasons – the round characters look a bit like snails, and the name rhymes with art deco.
The demo version of the font can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
Windlass Font Takes to the Road
I stopped into our local barbeque parlor for dinner this evening, and parked out front I found a stylishly decorated Mini Cooper wrapped with art promoting DragonsLair, Austin’s preeminent comic book and game emporium. Even better, the store logo featured on the car (one of two in a matched set) features our Windlass Font.
Because of the popularity of pirate themed books, movies and games, Windlass has recently become by far our most popular and bestselling font, supplanting Folkard which stole the title from Abaddon several years ago.
It was very cool to run into Windlass on wheels right in the little exurb of Austin where I live. It turns out that it was on the way to a live action roleplaying event at the nearby J. Lorraine Ghost Town just east of Manor, Texas.
Featured Font: Orphiel
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Script fonts can be a real challenge to design, especially when they are designed to have interconnecting characters which require exacting kerning and character positioning. When we first developed Orphiel we did a lot of kerning work on it, but despite a generally pleasing appearance, there were some inconsistencies in the kerning which were never really satisfactory. This kind of demanded a new release of the ornate and decorative script font with extra attention to the connections between the characters and adding even more kerning pairs.
The result is a new release of Orphiel which works even better than the original with some essential improvements which make it cleaner and better flowing. It’s a great font for formal documents, invitations and decorative uses where you need a fancy script style.
The demo version of the font can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
New Font: Shayne
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We’ve featured some articles on the designs of pulp novel covers from the mid-20th century, including s look at the fonts used in those designs. We’ve also released fonts based on those designs, like suspicion. These old book cover designs are a great resource for period fonts and lettering, and in going through a slew of them, my eye was caught by the title design for the Dell reissues of the Mike Shayne mystery novels in the 1960s, which use a heavy weight font which mixes up traditional upper and lowercase forms. The font is very characteristic of 1960s book and poster design and similar to the font used for the first Rolling Stones Album and the Mickey Spillane pulp novels of the same period.
The Spillane font falls in the same general style but although it is about the same boldness, is notably different in having tiny serifs on the characters. It also uses just uppercase forms rather than mixing upper and lowercase, but in developing the Shayne font it was a useful reference for what the uppercase variants might look like.
The end result in the Shayne font is a heavy weight which mixes upper and lowercase character forms in a way which is very characteristic of 1960s design. It’s as excellent for posters and book covers today as it was when the Mike Shayne novels were popular.
The Mike Shayne mystery novels were written by a series of writers under the name Brett Halliday, and though they are not much remembered today, they were very popular, spawning 12 movies, a radio show and a television series. They followed the popular private eye conventions of the period, including the classid drawing room denouement with all of the suspects present. The series began in the 1930s and reached its peak of popularity in the late 1950s before being supplanted by racier hard-boiled detective fiction.
The demo version of the font can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.
Classic Font: Zothique
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Zothique is one of our most unusual decorative calligraphy fonts. It is based on original hand lettering with a fanciful, flourished style which is charming and whimsical. The font includes a large selection of alternative decorative characters and special characters and swashes.
Zothique was first released way back in 1998 and has gone through several revisions and refinements since then and has been one of our most popular fonts. This latest revision includes a bonus bold variant of the font custom designed to preserve the look while making an even stronger impression, plus expanded foreign language characters.
You can try the DEMO version of Zothique for free. The demo has a limited character set. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 and download it right away.
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.
Featured Font: Malagua
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Malagua was originally released in 1999 and has been revised several times since then, culminating in this new release with improved weighting and additional special characters.
MAlagua is based on examples of rough hand lettering from the 17th century. It has characteristics in common with some of our other colonial period fonts like Allegheny, Queensland and Hesperides but is much more irregular, with a shaky, rough appearance. It’s also part of our Colonial Fonts package.
One of the special features of Malagua is that it includes alternate versions of many of the characters so you can vary the appearance of words so that it looks more like what you type is hand written.
You can try the DEMO version of Malagua for free. The demo has a limited character set. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 and download it right away.
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.
New Font: Original Django
| In an article last week we explored the origins of the font used in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and a bit of the history of the Django genre of films. That was part of the process of the development of an original font based on the lettering used in the original Django, a process similar to what was presumably used to create the font featured in the Tarantino film. The goal of the project was not to create a duplicate of the title font in the new film, but to make an original font working from the same source material. Naturally the end result is quite similar to the font in Django Unchained, but at the same time a unique and original interpretation of the title lettering in the older film.
Our Original Django font includes a full set of uppercase characters and custom small caps, plus numbers, punctuation and some special characters like the extra-long “J” used in the original titles. Like all our fonts it is available in both TrueType and OpenType format for Windows or MacOS. You can view a full character set of Original Django by using our new type preview tool to view custom samples of text in this font. Or alternatively you can download the demo version with a limited character set for free. And if you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our OMLINE STORE for just $24. |
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