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: Circuit
| Circuit was designed for a project back in the late 1990s and has languished in our back catalog since then because of its very specialized look, though it is featured in our Futuristic Fonts collection. We were reminded about it recently because of its use in an upcoming book project and it seemed like a good time to make it a featured font. Its origins are interesting. The character forms are taken from a font we designed for an industrial client, but to make it unique we actually used scanned images of circuit boards from an old Macintosh computer to produce the unique patterning in the characters.
You can try the DEMO version of |
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New Font: Suspicion
 I recently wrote a brief article on pulp novel book cover art and lettering as a source of inspiration. Inevitably this led me to actually work on developing some fonts based on the lettering styles featured on the covers of some of these genre classics from the 1950s and 1960s. The archive of covers I tracked down had lots of good source material, but I decided to make my first project the title lettering from a series of novels by John D. MacDonald published by Fawcett Books. They all featured titles in a fairly similar style, though with some subtle variations, and I decided to use as my primary sources the examples featured on three novels: The Girl the Gold Watch and Everything, Area of Suspicion and On the Run. |
PURCHASE
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One of the characteristics of the titles was that they used multiple variations of the same basic letter forms to create unusual variations in character placement and to allow nesting of certain characters in special relationships with other characters. Simulating this effect required the creation of three complete sets of characters, representing three possible positions and forms for each letter. A few letters even have a fourth variation. For the user this means that hitting the any letter key in combination with shift or option will produce different versions of the letter. As you can see by comparing the image of the original book cover to the sample graphic of the font, the end result is a pretty good match for the overall style, if not identical in every particular. The variations from the specific character forms on the cover of Area of Suspicion come because in some cases I opted to use better formed or more interesting versions of those characters from the cover lettering on one of the other novels in the series. The font ended up being named Suspicion and it captures the kind of paranoid out of control feel of the cover lettering pretty well.
You can try the DEMO version of Suspicion for free, but it includes only one version of each character. Or you can ORDER the full version online and download it right away.
Modern Poster Fonts
 Click any font to see a larger sample.              |
Because the modern era of design draws on so many past traditions, it’s hard to nail down a selection of fonts and label them as essentially modern. To research our modern fonts collection we looked at nightclub posters from the 80s and 90s, popular advertising of the period, and tried to pick out fonts which fit the design styles of that period or were based on hand lettering from that period. The result is an eclectic set of 12 fonts which have the look and feel of the last decade and a half or so.
The fonts in this collection are basically poster fonts, intended for designing display advertising, posters, leaflets and flyers. They include some classic designs with a modern feel and some entirely new designs unique to the period. Dromon and Eglantine are actually based on designs of the Art Nouveau period, but ones which have resurfaced and gained a lot of popularity in recent years. Hamilton has the classic look of movie poster titles. Fortinbras has a strong commercial art look. Oblivion, Squiffy, Cosmic Dude and Ducatus Rough are all inspired by nightclub poster lettering. Ascelon has a modern look and seemed like just the text font the collection needed. Bilitis is there because we needed a brush script style and it’s our most modern looking one. It’s a strange mix, but definitely in the modern mode.
Several of the fonts are new releases, specially for this package. Ducatus Rough, Cosmic Dude, Oblivion and Ekberg were put out just to make our selection of modern fonts more complete. You haven’t seen them before and you won’t find them in any of our other packages.
For a limited time the Modern Fonts collection is available at an introductory price of only $59. It comes for either Windows or MacOS computers and includes both Postscript and TrueType fonts. You can order by phone at 1-512-276-7352, or to order online just CLICK HERE
To get an idea of what our Modern fonts are like, try out the demo version of our latest one, Cosmic Dude. It doesn’t have all of the punctuation and variant characters, but should give you a good feel for the font.
Cosmic Dude is based on hand-drawn poster lettering. It has a super-heavy, irregular look with variant characters which fit together remarkably well to producea a sort of interlacing effect. The full version includes a large selection of variant character forms and special characters. Click here to download the working trial version of Cosmic Dude for either WINDOWS or MacOS. Or you can purchase this font online and get it quickly by email, including all the alternate and additional characters – BUY IT NOW
New Font – Stampwork
Something old. Something new. We’ve done a lot of fonts lately based on antique type and lettering, so here’s something brand new, a font designed to look like the output of a rubber stamp. It’s in the tradition of our Draughtwork and Roughwork fonts, with a sort of technical look.
Stampwork has two versions of the uppercase character set. One set features over and underline artifacts like those produced by the edge of a rubber stamp which is pressed down too hard. The other set is plain. There are also alternative line artifact characters to add variation.
Download and try out the free demo version of Stampwork (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.
