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.
New Font – Eisenstein
| Film director Sergei Eisenstein was a major influence on the Constructivist movement through his collaboration with Alexander Rodchenko and by inspiring other artists of the era. Thus it seems appropriate that the final font in our Constructivist Font Collection should be named after Eisenstein, especially as the font partakes of the kind of lettering and design which he particularly favored.Eisenstein features an English-language character set based on Russian Constructivist lettering from a party propaganda poster of the late 1920s. The font includes customized capital letters and small-caps with compatible weighting, which is similar to the original lettering. A full Cyrillic character set is not available yet, but may be added in the future if there is interest.
While we would never support or endorse an inhumane political system like Communism, especially given our founder’s experience living in Russia during the soviet era, there is an undeniable power to the design ideas which came out of the early days of communism and we hope that people will take those strong ideas and put them to better uses and thereby redeem the work of artists like Rodchenko and Eisenstein. You can view a full character set of Eisenstein 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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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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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: Aerobrush
 I was playing around with some paint at our chicken coop and realized I had an opportunity to do some hands-on design work for a brush-style font, so I did a set of sample brush strokes on a piece of the recycled coroplast which covers the sides of the coop. Those samples were the perfect starting point for designing a new brush script font. I took digital photos of the brush strokes, simplified them in black and white and imported them into a font design program where I converted them to outlines. Starting with the base letter forms of our Airship font I then added the brush stroke samples to the characters in natural locations and the result is the Aerobrush font which looks remarkably like it was painted with a house-painter’s brush. Kind of an ideal font for the signs at the entrance to a summer camp in a horror movie. It even includes a full set of alternate characters for some of the variation you’d expect in a hand painted sign.
You can try the DEMO version of Aerobrush for free by registering. Or you can ORDER the full version for only $24 online and download it right away. |
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