The basic structure of the game is to play a bird with tiny wings who flies and slides and glides over a series of hills trying to achieve various objectives. The hills are idealized and done in two or three tone stripe patterns and what stands out is the color pairings Illiger has made with those striped patterns. They are bold and unusual yet very effective, with a really eye-pleasing softness despite the vividness of the colors. The colors are rather reminiscent of some of the pop art of the 1970s or of the far out fabric designs of legendary Finnish design firm Marimekko from that period.

Textures and shadows play their part too.  Illiger consistently uses a subtle texture which provides patches of slight variation of color which softens the overall look, and shadows add another level of variation.  But it all comes down to the choices of colors and the juxtaposition of strongly contrasting colors really works.  Pink and bright green, dark blue and gold, blood orange and a light green.  None of the colors are pure primary colors, but their vividness and the contrasts work extraordinarily well.  Playing the game makes me want to design graphics in the color schemes it features and that is a the highest compliment.

I consider myself pretty lucky that Austin is one of the five cities hosting a yearly Flatstock show. I’m not quite so happy about the fact that it’s held during SXSW, which is becoming more and more of an inconvenience for anyone who wants to travel anywhere downtown in Austin while it is going on. SXSW gets larger every year and even on the last day the crowds were unbelievable. No parking, even at inflated rates, lines of hipsters a mile long to get in to see bands, and this year the convention center had new events jammed into every nook and cranny.

Despite what appeared to be a smaller exhibit hall there were actually more exhibitors at Flatstock than there were last year. Not a huge number more, but some new ones as well as many who were returning. The layout of booths was more economical and the booths were jammed closer together, but there was certainly a lot to look at. The downside was that the crowds were larger by an even greater proportion. There was less room to move around, fewer opportunities to talk to the artists and people were selling out of posters and running out of business cards. The upside was that with more of a crowd and more of an assurance of sales the prices for posters were considerably lower overall – a pleasant surprise at a time when the price of so many things seems to be going up.

There’s no way I can go over everything I saw at the show in detail. There were a lot of great designers there, including many who were not there last year and a few I covered in my previous article. I’ll skip those I hit last year and hit the highlights of what I saw this year, some of which was very good and some of which was somewhat mystifying. There were fewer of the stock efforts to reproduce the design styles of the sixties and the Art Nouveau era, which was probably a plus, but the level of creativity of those trying to define a more contemporary style was not always impressive. Too many designers seemed willing to substitute complexity for creativity or to neglect text and design and let illustration carry work which seemed incomplete. Flatstock should be about posters as coherent works of design, not about great illustrations with a few words in a boring font hidden in a corner.

Two other interesting trends also stood out. A lot more of the designers were local to the Austin area, though there were still some from places as far away as England and Germany. There were also more exhibitors whose main business was something other than posters, but who produce posters as part of that business, including record labels, illustrative artists, publishers and clothing companies. One example which combined both of these trends was Austin-based Rural Rooster which was selling posters, but also selling the graphic fashion t-shirts which are their main stock and trade.

Also notable this year was a strong presence for art and posters with a psychedelic theme. The art prints and poster designs of Charlie Hardwick certainly fell into that category with their day-glo colors and floral motifs. Pop-art psychedelia with a somewhat sterilized commercial look. Like posters you’d have found at Sears a few years after psychedelia went mainstream. More visceral were a few posters which strayed into the domain of early 1970s blacklight poster design style, a style which seems dated, but was a nice change from the usual attempts to copy the classic Fillmore and Armadillo show posters. The example to the right really stood out. I haven’t been able to figure out who the artist was from the zillion business cards I collected, but I like the effect and it uses my Butterfield font, so it deserves a mention.

I also have to throw a nod to Vrooooom Press, a letterpress printing company showing off some creative applications of a venerable printing technology. You know I love letterpress and last year there was very little of it to be seen at Flatstock, so their work was nice to see. Unfortunately their website doesn’t show much of their poster work, but they had some great examples on display at the show. Also showing some good retro letterpress style work at Flatstock was Spoke Art. They represent a number of artists whose work ranges from the traditional 60s style show posters to letterpress to much more modern designs. I particularly liked their pieces by Chuck Sperry and Emory Douglas. Unlike most of the posters at the show, theirs were quite expensive, so I didn’t end up taking any home.

I overlooked him last time, so I have to mention the comic-book inspired art of Flynn Prejean of Bad Moon Studios. He’s known most for his posters for The Misfits, but he does a great job combining vivid art with creative use of type and lettering. He uses a lot of my font designs (Semiramis, Ligeia, Ironwork, Spoonbill) or variations derived from them, which predisposes me to like his work, but what really impresses me is his composition and the way he brings art and type together to produce an integrated whole without being too derivative of traditional styles, though obviously drawing on 70s era horror comics for inspiration. He’s also one of the few artists who is clearly working in a digital format to recreate a slicker version of a classic look, which I find appealing.

I can’t wrap up without a couple of more vague mentions. One goes to an artist who had run out of cards and who I can only identify as SBPW. His stripped down style for posters for shows at the Beachland Ballroom in Ohio was really eye catching, and I liked the fact that he kept things simple and clean and had the audacity to silkscreen his posters on unusual paper stock, including butcher paper and construction paper. I actually paid (not very much) to pick up a couple of his posters, and if I had any idea how to track him down I might buy more. I don’t know who he is, but I like what he does.

And finally a nod to Clint Wilson, another Austin local who had the kindness to pose for a photo with his poster for a Ministry show which features my Captain Kidd font, and who also does some very nice poster work, including a set of super cute dinosaur cards for kids. A lot of his work has a cool, distressed-punk look and a childlike quality which I find engaging.

I’ve just touched on a handful of the many great artists and designers who were at Flatstock 29 in Austin this year. But viewing the show in snippets like this is kind of like the experience of actually attending, where the crowds were too large and posters were selling out and it was hard to get to what you wanted to see. To really get an idea of the diversity Flatstock has to offer, find the show which is nearest where you live and take a few hours to walk through the hall and really experience it.

For the last several years one of the most interesting of these has been the Blue Genie Art Bazaar which is held at the Monarch Event Center, a converted movie theatre in the Lincoln Village Shopping Center in North Central Austin at the intersection of Highway 290 and IH-35. It's scheduled for the whole month of December and stays open late (9pm and then midnight Christmas week). The unusual name comes from the Blue Genie Art company which is the main sponsor, a company which does large-scale art installations for advertising and signage — giant chickens, vegetables, jackalopes, dinosaurs and the like which have graced local establishments like Jerry's Artorama, Atomic Tattoo and Hyde Park Grill.

In the last few years I've fond the Blue Genie Art Bazaar to be a a far more interesting alternative to more well known holiday markets. Their vendors are juried and selected for the quality of their work and also to make sure there is a nice variety of types of work for sale. They also seem to be selected with a particular attention to the graphic arts and printed works, and an eye for the bizarre which I find particularly appealing.

The selection of vendors this year was a little different from last year, though there was a similar mix of jewelry, crafts, printed works and original art. Some of the standouts from previous years were still represented. One of the most notable was Rory Skagen and his selection of unusual toys, faux retro products, posters for ad campaigns and movies which never existed and other oddities. Another standout was Chia Hats which has expanded on their collection of furry hats with ears to add some cute original clothing designs. Also back with their soft bats and mice and other handicrafts for hids was Alicia Traveria.

Among the new vendors, or at least ones I haven't seen before, were several excellent graphic artists. My wife was particularly impressed by some of the anthropomorphic animal prints from Abi Daniel and prints by Dana Younger, especially a series of vivid prints of irises. My daughter liked the fanciful art of Nathan Jensen. I was more impressed with some of the creative printing projects, including Michael Schliefke's alternative comic book Really White Vigelante, Kristen Hagen's even more alternative comic Dead Squirrel Girl, plus I rather like Browns Arm photos of classic signage (and their website is very cool) and was impressed with the creative printing techniques of Bearded Lady Printing. There was also a small section of original drawings and paintings by legendary Austin cartoonist Sam Hurt of Eyebeam fame.

As always, the coolest things to me are the creative things which artists here in the Southwest do with skulls and skeletons in the tradition of Mexican Calavera art and Jose Guadalupe Posada. In this area two booths really stood out. One was the colorful sculptural art of Cindy Raschke with its over-the-top variants on traditional themes. The other was the prints and cards and especially the exrtra-fun paper dolls from Leila Hijazi of Illustrated Ink, who finds some very clever ways to use Calavera images and fantasy themes. I particularly liked the Calavera mermaid and tentacular siren paper dolls. She gets a special thumbs up for using my Asrafel font on her signage.

There was lots more to see, but I can't begin to remember it all. Cool knitwear and futuristic clothing and all sorts of interesting jewelry and knick-knacks. If you're in Austin or anywhere near Austin you should take the time to spend a few hours wandering around the show. Bring the kids and snap photos of them riding the giant Jackalope. If you're not in Austin, give some of the many links provided here to find out more about the artists. Either way you'll be on the right track for some unique Christmas gifts.

I’ve thought about this before. I’ve even designed quite a few fonts specifically for use in political advertising. I’m also not the only person putting some thought into the topic. There were quite a few articles written about it during the 2008 election, particularly relating to some of the images and poster designs used by the Obama campaign. I was recently brought back to thinking about this subject by a call from a reporter for a major newspaper looking for some expert input on the use of fonts in political campaigns.

A lot of what it takes to market a candidate comes down to branding, and visual representations are key to that, especially in how the candidate’s name and message are converted from raw information to visual form, usually through the use of well-chosen fonts in an appealing layout.

Campaign signs are particularly tricky, because you have to walk a very fine line. The design needs to be original enough to be remembered, but it still has to fit within some familiar parameters do voters can relate to it. A sign has to convey information about the candidate and a feel for the type of candidate he or she is, but can’t bee too crowded or cluttered or it becomes overwhelming and the information gets lost in the clutter.  It needs to be readable at a distance and emphasize the name which will be on the ballot in an unambiguous way.   It’s also good to avoid putting anything unnecessary on the sign which can distract from its impact.

In 2008 we saw campaign marketing influenced by high-end advertising design style and slick candidate packaging with a movement away from traditional style towards a more modern symbolism. In the Obama campaign the logo became more important than the name, and image became more important than message. You ended up with a single letter turned into a symbol as the campaign identifier, reducing the candidate to an iconic figure.  This is fantastic if you can pull it off, but it’s a lot harder to do with most candidates and a disaster if you can’t pull it off.  This year we’re seeing a dramatic move in the opposite direction, with designs and marketing themes influenced by the tea party movement and the new radicalism of the right, evoking earlier times and traditional values going back to the 1950s and 1960s and even all the way to the days of the founding fathers.

The result of the political climate bouncing back and forth so quickly is a year with a bizarre mix of campaign styles and strategies which is chronicled in the signage lining our roadways and decorating our front yards.  Everyone is trying to make their mark in the public eye, sometimes with good results and sometimes with results which are pretty awful.

One clear trend is a back to basics motif found on the posters of many candidates this year, probably an influence of the Tea Party movement.  There’s a real effort to harken back to an earlier era, as demonstrated by the very effective traditional posters for Carl Paladino and Mary Lou Serafine shown above.  They have simple, clear sans serif fonts in a stark two color contrast.  The fonts look like Aventine and Myriad which are specifically designed for high readability in large sizes at a distance.  They look like letterpress printed posters virtually indistinguishable from what you might have seen in a campaign in the 1950s or 1960s.  There’s a deliberate avoidance of the full color technology and modern graphic complexity which characterized so many designs in 2008.  I also rather like Paladino’s choice of orange, a common color on letterpress show posters from the 1960s, but not used much today.

Another interesting example of this retro trend is the poster shown to the right from Carly Fiorina’s campaign for Senate in California.  Fiorina has gone with a 1970s look for her poster and to some degree for her entire campaign.  She even dresses rather like a 1970s fashion icon.  The use of lower case and an extremely thin font on a solid background with elements of the design off center is straight out of a 1970s fashion layout.  It is clearly inspired by the same design trends which made the <a href=”http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/the-grandest-hoax-of-all-time-or-of-this-week_b1502″>Rene Chalet</a> font hoax so believable.  It’s great branding and effective as a logo.  It doesn’t work as well as a yard sign or poster because of the poor contrast for everything except the candidate name and the low readability of the sign at any kind of distance.

Then there are the posters where various factors have gone horribly wrong.  I found quite a few which were awful for one reason or another, but settled on three which really stand out and exemplify everything I would put on a poster design “don’t” list.  A good sign needs to have the candidate name and the office he’s running for on it.  Beyond that you should avoid adding more than one other item.  The best to include are either a slogan or a website address, and nothing too long because that means the type will get too small and hard to read.  That’s it.  Anything beyond that is a distraction and distractions kill the effectiveness of the poster.  Remember that your audience is often people driving by in a car and take that into consideration.  Lawson’s poster is also notable for confusing voters by looking like the label for a new herbal supplement (possibly deliberate marketing to California neohippies) and having a long, boring and too small to be readable slogan.

Some common design choices are particularly bad.  Poorly rendered photographs of the candidate are a major mistake.  Is the candidate’s face going to be on the ballot?  If not, then why put it out there except to gratify their ego and give critics something to draw a moustache on.  Look at the poster for Kristina Lawson.  If that’s the best facial expression you can come up with for your poster, then better to leave your face off.  Another common problem is picking the wrong fonts.  Complex script fonts which overlap are hard to read.  Even worse when you add shadows or outlines or special effects or decorations to them.  It also doesnt help to have text in a color that fades into the background, or to have too many different fonts.  Look at Jay Ramras’ poster from this year’s Alaska primaries.  he makes pretty much all these mistakes.  A number of critics are convinced he lost the election because no one could read his poster or voters were looking for Trey Rampas on the ballot.

Perhaps most of all, don’t put things on your poster which people can use to make fun of you.  That’s not the kind of publicity you want.  Tea Party populism has led to a lot of people producing amateurish posters where they take themselves too seriously, but the prize has to go to Hawaii’s Ed Justus with his full-color poster which features a horrifying photo cartoon where he appears with a giant head, plus an unreadable font, a kitschy slogan in a type size too small to read from more than  a couple of feed away and a layout which has everything spaced wrong.  His sign is so annoying I want to get some just so that I can take them out in the back yard and use them for target practice.  Maybe looking like a tourist is a good strategy when you’re running for County Council in Kaua’i, but I can’t believe the local community doesn’t find the cartoonish approach to the campaign somewhat insulting.  We’ll see in a couple of week if the “lovable goofball” campaign strategy works out or if he has to go back to just being the owner of the westernmost bookstore in the United States.

A lot of marketing is about branding, and that’s true in politics as much as anything else.  You want to stand out and you want to be remembered, but you want it to be in a positive way, not because your signs were weird or ridiculous.  The tried and true answer is to go for an image which is strong and visually striking but simple and  traditional.  Stick with clear, readable fonts, strong contrasts and avoid including extraneous material.  Make your sign something people can take in thoroughly in a few seconds while driving by texting on their phone and eating a burrito in their SUV full of noisy children.

For fonts specifically designed for political sign and logo design see out a href=”http://www.fontcraft.com/fontcraft/index.php/2010/01/political-fonts-package/”>Political Fonts package.

(a somewhat different version of this article appeared previously on Blogcritics Magazine)

A couple of years ago Scurlock was used for the box cover and interior titles of a lavishly produced Arthurian-themed game called Shadows Over Camelot, published by Days of Wonder, which has also made good use of our fonts in some of their other games like Pirates Cove. Apparently it was popular enough – despite rather static game play – that it deserved an expansion, and so it was recently joined by Shadows Over Camelot: Merlin’s Company which adds more players, more characters (including Merlin himself) and new dimensions to the play of the game. The expansion has the same graphically appealing look as the original game, with great art and high quality components and continues the use of Scurlock all over the place.

Scurlock has also shown up recently on a new game from leading German game publisher Kosmos. It’s used for the main titles and cover of Blue Moon City which is available here in the US from Fantasy Flight Games. Blue Moon City is designed by the legendary Reiner Knizia who created Amun Ra, Medici and Tigris and Euphrates. The game is set in a fantasy city where you are trying to rebuild and restore order after a chaotic period. The components and design are impressive and the overall look is rich, but the game play is dismayingly abstract and seems almost abstract, a problem with Knizia’s games which often seem more formulaic than creative. It does showcase Scurlock nicely, though.

The most famous example of this is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which went through three illustrators in its first 50 years in print with definitely mixed results. When the lack of color in the original extraordinary pen and ink drawings by the legendary John Tenniel seemed too pedestrian for a new generation accustomed to color, the publisher turned to Arthur Rackham. Not a bad choice since Rackham was already established as the greatest book illustrator of his age and arguably the greatest book illustrator of the last two centuries. Rackham had the skills and imagination to top Tenniel and not embarrass himself trying. But even Rackham’s classic work was not sufficient, and within 20 years it fell to the estimable Charles Folkard to try to top Rackham’s work with something more lush and with richer colors. Folkard’s illustrations are brilliant, but now largely forgotten, because fine though they were, they came after artists whose work was impossible to outdo. The publisher had essentially set Folkard an impossible task and the result was an edition which vanished into obscurity.

The situation with Alice is hardly unique, and as classic works go out of copyright it seems to become more common as more publishers have the opportunity to make bad decisions and desecrate classics with inferior illustrations.

Perhaps the most bizarre is the decision to publish books by writers who illustrated their own work with their illustrations replaced by someone else’s interpretation of their ideas. With some who were primarily writers and only nominally artists like J. R. R. Tolkein this makes some sense, but in other cases where legendary artists also wrote the texts they illustrated the decision just seems bewildering.

A case in point is a relatively recent edition of Howard Pyle’s classic The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from Fall River Press which preserves Pyle’s stilted and archaic retelling of the tales, but replaces his remarkable and evocative illustrations with scratchboard vignettes by Scott McKowen. Now there’s no question that Pyle was an interesting writer and his version of the tales is a classic, but Pyle’s work as an artist and illustrator towers above his work as a writer. He’s not just an illustrator, he’s the greatest American book illustrator of the 19th century and the teacher who inspired subsequent generations of artists and revolutionized book illustration. To give any artist, no matter how skilled, the challenge of updating Howard Pyle is just ridiculous.

McKowen’s scratchboard illustrations are technically skilled, but sterile and a far cry from some of the more interesting illustrative work he has done for other projects, particularly graphic novels like 1602. I can only surmise that he was intimidated by the ludicrousness of being asked to do new art for a book Pyle had already illustrated and just fulfilled the contract, took his paycheck and walked off shaking his head at the absurdity of the assignment. The strangest part of the whole design concept of the book is that McKowen’s illustrations are effectively black and white sketches just like Pyle’s when the one area that you could argue there might have been a justification for redoing the illustrations would have been to add color, the one shortcoming of Pyle’s original work. Of course that problem was already addressed almost 100 years ago when Pyle’s student N. C. Wyeth added remarkable color plates to Pyle’s text.

My puzzlement at the editorial decision to reillustrate this Pyle classic seems well founded, because although I spotted one copy of the book on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, it appears not be available through Amazon which suggests that it has been a deservedly dismal commercial failure. Fall River Press is an imprint of Sterling Publishing which mainly exists to release reprints and specialty books through Barnes and Noble. Nonetheless you would think that their editors had more sense than to undertake such a wrongheaded project. Why spend the money on inferior new illustrations when the brilliant original illustrations are just as much in the public domain and just as free to use as the text itself. I’m sure McKowen’s work didn’t come cheap, making it a remarkably bad business decision, paying money to reduce the quality of the product, and the end result is a book which just seems sad and lackluster in comparison to the original.

It’s hard enough to make a profit in the print publishing industry these days, even if you have some guaranteed exposure through a big chain like Barnes and Noble. This kind of poor decision making is why there probably won’t be a Sterling Prsss or even a Barnes and Noble in a few years, though I bet that someone (probably Dover) will still be making money publishing facsimile editions of Howard Pyle’s books with the original illustrations and decorations intact.

Our Howard Pyle Font and Art Package includes many of the best illustrations from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and other classic works

Blaylock is the progenitor of the Steampunk movement in literature and his series of Langdon St. Ives stories are one of his most notable contributions to the genre. The Ebb Tide is a new novel which takes off where his short story collection The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives ended. It’s not terribly long at a scant 132 pages, but it’s very nicely produced, with a cover and illustrations by J. K. Potter, from specialty-press publisher Subterranean Press. Perhaps the best thing about the design of the book is that the titles are done in our Goodfellow font, which can be found in our Steampunk collection.

As for the story itself, St. Ives and his sidekick Jack Owlesby discover an underground shipyard beneath London and take a voyage by submarine into a nightmare realm beneath the sea and confront a villain named Dr. Frosticus. It’s not the easiest read in the world, but it’s certainly an interesting read, and the Steampunk ideas come thick and fast in a heady mixture of Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s a book worth reading and it’s good to see Blaylock back on the job and perhaps ready to bring us more unique steampunk stories in the future.

Some years ago I had the pleasure of working on some publishing projects with Howard David Johnson a local Austin artist who I met through a mutual friend. He was a classically trained artist who was working as a studio photographer at the time and was interested in getting back into art. I was working as an editor and art director for a couple of different publishing ventures and his style was very compatible with my tastes, so I encouraged him to start doing some illustration work and threw a few small jobs his way. It was at a time when digital art was really coming into its own and I gave him a shove in the right direction with some suggestions of ways he could combine his traditional style and techniques with digital technology and got him started experimenting and discovering things on his own.

It’s now years later and I recently stopped by his website and discovered some impressive new works and really remarkable developments in his skills and technique. He’s living proof that in advanced middle age if the will and imagination are there you really can learn new things and grow creatively. David always had a remarkable facility for copying the style of other artists and illustrators, and was particularly influenced by the great illustrators of the late 19th century and the artists of the pre-raphaelite period. For example, you can see the influence of Millais and Waterhouse in the first and last images accompanying this article. As he began to explore digital media he began combining these classical styles with his interest in photography and digital art to produce mixed media images where elements were hand drawn, scanned and then finished as digital paintings incorporating photorealistic elements and figures based on live models, a technique which proved to be very powerful when combined with the themes of fantasy and mythology which he favors.

His online gallery is a remarkable resource and provides a history of the development of his technique, because many of his works are dated on the site. When I first worked with him there was an awkwardness in how he combined these elements, and sometimes the relative perspective wasn’t quite right or the different textures of hand-drawn elements and digital elements was jarring. By the time of our last collaborations his style had become more integrated, but you could still tell where he was working freehand and where he was working from photos or live models, and in works he did quickly like his illustrations like Reiner Knizia’s game Res Publica he still sometimes lapsed into a kind of two-dimentional cut-out style which was distinctive but less aesthetically pleasing. Then, sometime in 2006, several years after our last involvement he seems to have reached a creative tipping point. Works from that period on show a seamless integration of styles and a fully developed awareness of depth and proportion and lighting. You can tell that he’s still using the same combination of traditional techniques and photorealism, but the two styles have met in the middle, creating works which are realistic but clearly original and stylistically coherent. Many of these are just magnificent, like “Queen Cinderella” (above and left) and “Valkyrie Maiden” (to right), with subtle shading and use of light and a kind of altered realism which is very effective at making the fantastical seem real.

In his latest works he seems to have come full-circle, moving through digital art and returning to traditional media, but bringing his new techniques with him. Some of his most impressive new works like “Circe the Enchantress” (to the left) and “Athene” (top right) are done entirely without digital modification, in pencil and oils on canvas respectively. That he is able to work in both digital and traditional formats and produce such similar results is a truly remarkable commentary on how completely his skills have matured and what a great command he has over his tools. I find “Athene” to be particularly impressive, with the realism of the figure softened enough to fit with the more painterly background, and a really excellent recreation of the style of the pre-raphaelites with a result which reminds me a lot of the work of Sir William Russell Flint.

When browsing David’s art, be forewarned that he does take the occasional foray into the “chicks in chainmail” genre in the tradition of Frank Frazetta and he does have a fondness for beautiful and scantily clad women. The site even includes a section of erotic pin-up art, though he seems to have removed some of the most provocative images. There are also some disturbing religious themes if that kind of thing bothers you — both from a pagan and Christian perspective. He’s been very productive in the last few years and has managed to do detailed illustrations for the major themes of Greek, Celtic and Norse Mythology plus Arthurian legends and elements of other mythologies as well, all included on his website. He also has extensive samples of his fairy and fairytale illustrations included on the site, as well as articles on his technique and some of his subject matter and even a set of short art lessons for beginners. And just to beat my own drum for a second, he uses my font designs extensively on his site, particularly Stonecross, Brandegoris and Durrow.

If it’s not sufficient to view his work on the web — and it really isn’t the ideal format for this sort of detailed artwork — he has collected many of his images into two books which are available for purchase online. One covers mythology and the other covers fairies and fairytales. Original paintings are available for sale and you can also purchase prints of many of his works. And it looks like more and more you’ll be able to see his work on book covers and other publications, because as his work has improved his marketability has also increased and it looks like after years of hard work he may be starting to get some of the attention he deserves. Bravo!

Dave

You may have noticed that on many pages you visit there is a little icon to the left of the address line in your browser which is unique to that page. For example, this page has a little color decorative initial of an “S” in that spot. This is what’s called a favicon, and it’s a way of identifying your website which not only shows at the top of the browser, but also makes it stand out in a user’s browser history and bookmarks or favorites list, where it will show up on any listing of your site. Favicons aren’t essential, but it’s a clever little gimmick to make your site stand out to users.

Making a Favicon is relaly pretty simple, but despite that many find the process bewildering. For example, child-prodigy WordPress developer Matt Mullenweig wrote a comprehensive article on the subject which successfully makes the process so confusing and intimidating that he apparently scared himself into not putting a favicon on his own web page. I may be twice Matt’s age, but I think I can explain the process a little more clearly.

The Technical Stuff

A favicon is basically just a little tiny image. The trick is putting it in the right format and in the right location. The rest is aesthetics and there is some skill required in making an image that small which is still visually appealing. Here’s the basic procedure:

1. Start with a larger image and shrink it down to 16 pixels by 16 pixels using the graphics program of your choice.

2. Take your image, flatten any layers and save it as a Windows ICO file or a PNG file. Photoshop and Paintshop Pro both support these formats and Mac users can also use GraphicConverter, a powerful image manipulation tool from LemkeSoft which can even do the job in demo mode.

3. Upload the file you just created to the main directory which hosts your web page. If you put it in the top level directory of your site and host multiple pages it will show up on all of those pages. If you want separate pages to have separate favicons put them in individual directories with a different favicon in each one.

4. Add this code to the HEAD section of your page’s index.html or index.php file: <link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>. Or if you’re using a PNG file use: <link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”/favicon.png” type=”image/png”>. PNGs have the advantage of being able to have a transparent background. The favicon does not actually have to be named favicon, so it is also theoretically possible to host your favicons in a separate directory and access different ones for different pages using code like: <link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”/absolute-path-to-favicon-directory/your-favicon-name.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>.

5. Don’t be dismayed when your favicon doesn’t show up in your browser right away, or occasionally disappears when you change pages. At the very least you’ll need to quit your browser and you may need to clear out your cache before it appears. You may also notice that if your page stores some sub-pages in separate directories or uses a separate template for those pages you may need to add the favicon code in more than one location for it to show up on all pages.

That’s not too complicated. But like a lot of things, the technical aspects are easy and the artistic element may take years to master. It’s not at all easy to make an image which is only 16×16 pixels and is clearly recognizable for what you want it to be.

The Artsy Part

Now, I’d recommend starting with a source image which is at least four times the size of your final favicon. It’s just difficult to work on an image which is smaller than about 64×64 pixels. But remember that most of the detail you could put into a larger image will at best be wasted or at worst be confusing and muddying at 16×16 pixels. What works best in that small size is usually one or two very clear letters from a bold, distinct font, or a clear silhouette or outline image. In fact, the decorative initial favicon on this page is a good negative example, because it’s just too complex and has too many shapes and colors. It does give the impression of a decorative initial, but it’s hard to tell what letter it is. Strangely, Google made a recent change from a nice clear “G” character favicon to a muddled multi-color image, perhaps because it’s more unique.

You’re much better off with a clear, bold font like Aventine or a clean and stylized art deco style font like Falmouth or for something more quirky I’ve had good luck with Squiffy. For an image-style favicon nothing works better than the kind of outlines and silhouette shapes which also work well as printers ornaments as you can find in fonts like Caswallon Ornament, Sangrael or medtilesMedieval Tiles. The process required to make an image work as a font also makes it simple enough to work well as a favicon. It’s key to use bold colors, sharp contrasts and make sure that you don’t use lines so thin that they blur when reduced to small size. If you use letters you may even want to consider not using certain letters like A or R because the small spaces inside them don’t work well. You may even want to play around with plugins if you have Photoshop which enhance the outlines or contrast of the image.

Here are some sample favicons to critique:

First is the new Google favicon, which has nice bold colors, but I really can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be. Second is the favicon from this page made with a colorized version of the Morris Initials font. It’s too busy, but the colors come through nicely and you can tell it’s a decorative initial. Third is a favicon made with a character from the Caswallon Ornament font. It’s simple and attractive and you can tell it’s a leaf. The next two are made with Falmouth and Aventine. Both work well because the characters are so bold and have such clean lines. But the more letters you add the less clear they are. There’s just not much room in 16 pixels. The 6th example with two characters from Falmouth works fairly well, but I don’t think it would be possible to add anything more to it. As you can see the letters had to be made smaller overall to preserve their proportions with the greater width required for two characters. Last is a favicon using the chalice character from Sangrael, and it’s a good negative example because it’s just too small and too detailed to work well.

So the technical aspects of setting up a favicon are fairly easy. It’s the aesthetics which are most challenging, and you probably won’t get the hang of making a really great favicon until you’ve practiced and experimented a lot on your own. I know I’m far from perfect with it, and I’ve gone so far as to go in and edit them pixel by pixel in bitmap format.

While browsing through our local bookstore over the holiday weekend my eye was caught by a whole series of books which were using our Valdemar font prominently. The Age of Misrule book series by Mark Chadbourn features Valdemar as the main title for the series, so it appears on all the books in the series — three have been published so far, World’s End, Always Forever and Darkest Hour. The interesting part is that cover designer Nicole Sommer-Lecht actually seems to be paying attention, and used not only the widely disseminated original version of Valdemar, but also the much newer Valdemar Alternate character set. In fact, all of the letters in the word “misrule” in the title are from Valdemar Alternate except for the “s” which is drawn from the regular Valdemar set. The overall result is excellent, and it’s just the kind of book Valdemar was designed for. I also quite like the cover art by John Picacio, which is surprisingly conceptually reminiscent of the cover Howard David Johnson did for my Ysgarth RPG. Special kudos also go to Jon Anders of Pyr for putting such a good design team together.

I haven ‘t read the entire series yet, but so far World’s End is quite an engaging read. It’s well written and fast-moving, thematically reminiscent of some of the work of Robert Holdstock or Neil Gaiman, but much more commerically written for broad audience appeal. In some ways it’s a bit of a mish-mash, throwing every possible element of Celtic mythology together in an almost overwhelming way, but engaging characters and a quest-theme plot which keeps moving along makes it work. As a part-time celtophile I even rather like the particular interpretation of Celtic mythology which Chadbourn has opted for and the integration of mythological themes with a realistic contemporary setting. It’s more approachable than some books with similar themes without descending into the lighter fairy story mode which is so popular. In fact, it gets kind of grim with a strong ending which sets up the scenario for the coming books.

A good read with a great font as part of a really appealing cover design. What more could you ask for?