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: Death Ray
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When we did a font (and a feature article) recently based on a design by Alexander Rodchenko, the result was a very cool font, but while it was based on Rodchenko lettering, it is not the style most associated with his work. The tall thin look of the Rodchenko font is less typical of his work than the heavier, bolder constructed characters which ultimately became the standard model on which much of later Soviet-era poster lettering was based.
Then, in a bit of synchronicity we were called on to design a graphic for “Stop Cyber Spying Week”, the week of online protests against the CISPA bill which was being considered by Congress. It’s a terrible piece of legislation which lets the government search your email and files without due process of law, so it seemed appropriate to base the design on the ominous look of Rodchenko’s “Death Ray” poster. Since the poster was originally in Russian and the redesign needed to be in English all the fonts had to be replaced, so for accuracy that meant making a new font for the main title to match the original lettering with a more complete English character set. From there it was logical to expand it to a full font. The resulting font has a classic Russian poster look but a complete set of characters in English, including both an outline style as is featured in the original poster and a solid version for other uses. It does not include a set of cyrillic characters, but does have some special and alternate characters and punctuation. It may make the font even more appealing to know that $5 out of every copy of Death Ray sold will go to help underwrite efforts to fight CISPA when it goes up for consideration in the Senate. So you can get a cool font and also help protect internet privacy. You can try the DEMO version of Death Ray for free. The demo has only one version of each character, in alternating positions so you can get a feel for how the font works. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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Classic Font: Alecto
| Alecto was originally released in 2002 and was one of the fonts developed for our Futuristic Fonts package. It has a unique science fictional look, combining some of the look of an OCR font with pure fantasy elements. It’s just the kind of thing you’d expect to see on the side of a spaceship in an epic space opera movie.
This updated version of Alecto includes an expanded character set with additional symbol characters and additional variant versions of the standard characters. You can try the DEMO version of Alecto for free. The demo has a limited character set. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24, with the Rodchenko image gallery included, and download it right away. |
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New Font: Rodchenko
| Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) was one of the premier artists of the constructivist movement in Russia. Although he was a sculptor, painter and photographer, he is most remembered for his graphic design style in book and poster design. His unique and dramatic style defined Russian popular art of the early Revolutionary period. There is a special link between Rodchenko’s photographic work and his graphic designs. In his photographs he emphasized strong contrasts of light and shadow and used unusual angles and geometric shapes, producing images which you can see directly reflected in his graphic designs. Rodchenko had a unique eye for shapes and wrote of his photographic vision, “One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.”
After studying art in Moscow and producing a body of paintings in the constructivist style, Rodchenko became part of the Productivist movement, which advocated the incorporation of art into everyday life. He applied ideas from photography and constructivism to his graphic designs for posters, books, and films. Rodchenko also combined photography and graphic arts to produce photomontages , many of them as illustrations for works by poet and playwright Vladimir Myakovsky who he worked with closely in the 1920s. He also worked on the design of the magazine LEF and on journals promoting other artists of the Constructivist movement. His designs eliminated unnecessary detail, emphasized dynamic diagonal composition, and were concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. His later career overlapped with the emergence of Soviet Realism and increased government regimentation of the artistic community and as his work became more abstract and expressionist he was ostracized from official artistic circles, left to work primarily as a manager and organizer of photography exhibitions for the government. Rodchenko has has a lasting influence in poster and book design. His style was widely imitated in the West in the 1930s and even today artists like Shepard Fairey produce designs which clearly derive from Rodchenko’s work. We have produced several Constructivist style fonts in the past, and our latest is the new Rodchenko font based on his lettering from an advertisement for the Gum department store. We’ve also collected together a selection of Rodchenko poster and book cover designs which are included with the font if you purchase it, or which you can view here with the gallery tool. You can try the DEMO version of Rodchenko for free. The demo has only one version of each character, in alternating positions so you can get a feel for how the font works. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24, with the Rodchenko image gallery included, and download it right away. |
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New Font: Romark
| It’s the time of year when we do a lot of design for political posters and some of those projects need special fonts. On this kind of work we already get a lot of mileage out of fonts like Aventine and Atinson Egyptian, but we needed more diversity and something with a different look. Fonts for campaign posters can’t be terribly subtle. They have to be bold and visible from a moving car. So when we needed a heavy weight serif font, we came up with something unique to meet the need. The result is Romark, a font which looks a bit like a typewriter on way too many steroids or an attempt to draw Courier with a really large and not very sharp crayon. It was hand lettered and then the outlines were tuned up, but it still has a bit of a rough character. It’s very readable and highly visible and perfect for use on posters where you need a bold statement and don’t want something too generic looking.
You can try the DEMO version of Romark for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24online and download it right away. |
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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: True Golden
| True Golden is one of the cornerstone fonts in our William Morris collection. It is a unique rendering of Morris’ Golden type, which he based on samples of early Jensen typefaces. Our rendering of the style has a special, authentic look because unlike most versions of the font which are based directly on the metal type, it is based on printed samples so it preserves some of the heavier weight and softer outlines which the font had when printed on the thick, high quality papers used by Morris for his Kelmscott Press books. It is the only version of Golden designed to preserve the look of the font as it was intended to be printed. True Golden is part of our Master Font series and includes an expanded character set plus custom bold and italic weights of the font.
You can try the DEMO version of True Golden for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $29 online and download it right away. |
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New Font: Nostromo
| Nostromo is based on a sample of early 1900s period advertising lettering with a particularly dramatic personality and a look which really grabs the eye. The font includes all uppercase characters, with some variants, plus the unique feature that if you use the underline key it puts top and bottom rails connecting the characters before and after, creating a very striking effect. The font is playful but at the same time seems almost menacing. Ultimately it might find a place in our Steampunk collection. The name of the font is taken from the title of Joseph Conrad’s novel of the same name. The style of the font resonates with the name and it would have looked very appropriate on the cover of an early edition of the novel, had we made it 120 years earlier.
You can try the DEMO version of Nostromo for free with a limited character set. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. The full version features Postscript, TrueType and OpenType files. |
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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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New Font: Barnabas
| Our new Barnabas font is the result of our Dark Shadows font design project. It’s an original font inspired by the original titles for the Dark Shadows television show, but updated for a more contemporary audience with the upcoming release of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie in mind. It combines gothic capital letters with Latin small caps reminiscent of the original titles, but distressed and roughened to create a darker and more degenerate effect.
The name of the font was picked by voters on this page who preferred Barnabas (the first name of main character Barnabas Collins) to several alternatives. The sample graphic features a picture of the Corey Mansion which is the model for Collinwood in the TV series. It’s also the first new font to include the OpenType version as one of the standard formats at no additional charge, which will be our practice from here out. You can try the DEMO version of Barnabas for free with a limited character set. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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Featured Font: Illuminata
| Illuminata was inspired by lettering from a poster from the Fillmore in the 1960s. It was originally released in 2001 as part of the Psychedelic Fonts package and then later further developed for the Oroborosgame project. This latest revision features additional characters and rather than having just one version of the unique, super tall and narrow character set it features a set of custom extra bold versions of the characters on the upper case and the regular lighter weight characters for the lowercase.
You can try the DEMO version of Illuminata for free. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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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.
