Featured Articles
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
New Font: Langdon
| Langdon is our first new font of 2012. It’s based on samples of hand-rendered poster lettering from the early 1900s by J. M. Bergling. It has a strong, distinctive look with demi-serifs and an art nouveau or art deco look. It’s very much the kind of font which we might include in a new release of our Steampunk collection. It has some interesting features, including some alternative characters and a meticulously designed custom small-caps character set.
You can try the DEMO version of Langdon for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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Classic Font: Swithin
| Swithin was designed to be our featured holiday font for 2003. It is based on samples of advertising lettering from posters produced during the 1920s. The whimsical nature of the characters and the decorative elements make it an excellent font for holiday cards. It features a full uppercase character set and offset small caps for the lowercase. It looks great on Christmas cards. Swithin is available singly or in our Holiday Fonts and Art package.
You can try the DEMO version of Swithin for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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J. M. Bergling Art Nouveau Fonts
Over the last few years we’ve developed a number of fonts based on the hand lettering of early 20th century calligrapher J. M. Bergling. A lot of his work fits into the Art Nouveau category and of the notable calligraphers of the period his work particularly stands out as influential in the development of Art Nouveau derived poster lettering of the psychedelic era of the 1960s.
When you look at Bergling’s designs it is impossible not to see that they are the direct antecedents of some of the most famous styles of the lettering on show posters from clubs like the Fillmore. Some of the fonts in our Psychedelic Fonts package show their influence like Hendrix and Pantagruel.
As we developed more fonts based on Bergling’s lettering it seemed inevitable that we should put together a package focusing just on his fonts, and the obvious first choice was his most typically art nouveau style designs. We had already released Belgravia and Boetia in 2008, and Belgravia was one of our featured fonts for the Font Club. That wasn’t enough fonts, so we moved two more up in our production schedule and in the last month they were completed and thus came the release of Beaumains and Bosphoros – we thought we’d stick with names starting with “B” for the series since Bergling starts with it.
So we gathered the four fonts together into a mini-collection and it’s now released and available so you can get the set at more than half off the price of buying the fonts individually. The package is only $39 and can be bought in our ONLINE STORE.
New Font: Bosphoros
| We don’t normally like to follow the same theme too much with our new font releases, but because we wanted to put together a special package of fonts by J. M. Bergling we’re following the release of Beaumains with Bosphoros, another font based on Bergling’s series of art nouveau themed lettering styles. Bosphoros fits the same general style but has a unique form and a lot of alternate characters. Of our various Bergling fonts it is one of the ones which is closest to the style of the psychedelic poster lettering which Bergling’s designs influenced and which you can find many eamples of in our Psychedelic Fonts collection.
You can try the DEMO version of Bosphoros for free by registering. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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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.
New Font: Beaumains
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We’ve done a number of fonts based on lettering by vintage calligrapher and design historian J. M. Bergling, including several with an Art Nouveau flavor like Boetia and Belgravia. Our newest font is in that same tradition, but it is an unusual simplified alternative to traditional Art Nouveau lettering styles. It’s also set apart by having both a full upper and lowercase character set, while most Art Nouveau lettering only has an uppercase character set. The relative simplicity of the characters and the full set of characters makes it much more versatile and suitable for uses which more decorative fonts don’t adapt to well. It could even be used for text in select situations. The name of the font comes from Arthurian legend.
You can try the DEMO version of Beaumains for free by registering. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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Classic Font: Goodfellow
Goodfellow was first released in the spring of 1993. It was based on Art Nouveau period metal type designed for titles and logos. It became a surprise hit when Tim Burton used it as the title font for his hit animated film A Nightmare Before Christmas later that year. The downside was that we had released a demo version at that time and someone with more enterprise than integrity renamed it and released it all over the free font download sites under the name “Burton’s Nightmare.” Unfortunately, the version they pirated was full of design defects which we had corrected in our released version, but that pirated version was so widely circulated that it kind of undermined the distribution of the real font. Since then it has sold well and we’ve done many revisions and improvements, including cleaning the outlines and developing custom bold and italic weights and adding special foreign language characters, but the pirate version with its name association has become so ubiquitous that the real font has always languished in its shadow.
Nonetheless, we’ve worked hard to make Goodfellow a really excellent font, and with its Christmas association we thought it made sense to release the latest revision of Goodfellow during the holiday season, so we’ve made it our featured font for this week. The new version includes the latest version of all three weights with some new added features and improvements.
You can try the demo version of Goodfellow for free, or order the full version online with the alternate characters and special symbols.
New Font – Malvern
Malvern is a new Celtic-style font with upper case letters which are an attractive variant on insular minuscule lettering but with a unique lowercase character set which is stylistically compatible but not really part of the Celtic tradition. It fits well with the style of the fonts from our Celtic Fantasy collection, which it will probably eventually be added to. The uppercase characters are somewhat similar to our classic Durrow font, but with some additional flourishes. Download and try out the free demo version of Malvern (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.
New Font: Valentin
Valentin is an Art Nouveau font with an eccentric, stylized look. It has the same fixed-weight characteristics as Ganelon and Gaheris, but the character forms are dramatically different. It’s clean and clear and very readable, very much the kind of lettering you’d have seen on 1920s vaudeville playbills. The graphic with the letter sample to the right isn’t part of the font, but seemed to fit stylistically. It’s a bit of decorative marginalia from a book illustrated by Clara Peck which is just full of Arthurian theme illustrations and decorative motifs which are going to be included in our forthcoming Arthurian Fonts and Art package. You can try out the free demo version of Valentin for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Valentin is available on our Ordering Site.
Berenicia Font
I’ve been working on a number of new fonts at the same time, and the first one to pop out in finished form is Berenicia. It’s based on samples of Art Nouveau period advertising lettering, with a custom lower case character set added and the original hand lettered characters cleaned up and regularized. When I first started working on it I thought that the shape of the A and some of the other characters reminded me of Celtic square uncial styles, but on consideration I actually think it bears more resemblance to Church Slavonic and lettering styles from Russia or even the Byzantine Empire. Not entirely shocking, since there was a history of cultural contact between the Byzantines and the early Christian Celts. You can try out the free demo version of Berenicia for either MacOS or Windows, and the full version of Berenicia is available on our Ordering Site.
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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.
