Fontcraft: Scriptorium Fonts, Art and Design

Featured Font: Bilitis

Dave — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:45:45 +0000

Bilitis is an original “brush script” style font we designed for a project back in 1998 and released then with some success. It has a strong visual appeal with rough hewn character forms which are very unusual. In this new release we’ve also added a larger selection of alternate character forms and ligatures to add more variety if you want to explore the extended character set. As a script which doesn’t have too much of a refined and elegant look it’s a nice alternative style to have in your collection.

The demo version of Bilitis can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.

May Day Sale

Dave — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:40:24 +0000

May Day comes but once a year to fill our hearts with joy and cheer…

In honor of May Day and the coming of summer, through the end of May 1st you can get 25% off of any order with NO minimum by using the coupon code MAYDAY on checkout.

Wayland, Wayland, Shoe Me My Mare!

Dave — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:56:26 +0000

Some while ago we added to our library an early 20th century book called Singing Games for Children which contains a dozen sets of detailed instructions for classic singing and dancing games for children – not the ones we’re familiar with today, but antique games with themes from myth and fairytales. Each game is nicely illustrated with a full-color plate and also marginalia showing the subject of the game.

Just to provide an example of the content of this fascinating book, we’ve taken one of the games and are providing it here as a free sample in PDF format. It’s called “Wayland, Wayland, Shoe Me My Mare!” It is based on a classic story from Celtic mythology and designed for boys and girls to sing in a round. At one time games like this were commonplace in schools and perhaps when we release this book as an ebook we can revive that charming tradition. For now you can get a nice sample by downloading this PDF: WAYLAND.

New Font: Escargot

Dave — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:50:34 +0000

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Escargot is based on lettering from the cover of an early pulp novel I came across a couple of months ago. It’s a strong example of a distinctive style of sign and poster lettering from the 1930, characterized by super high contrast between the weighting on the left and right sides of the character. It’s a style particularly identified with art deco design, and variations of it can be found all over the place in period design, on movie marquis, electronic products and logos. It’s actually similar to the base character designs of which a much more ornate variant is used in the forthcoming movie version of The Great Gatsby. The name was picked for a couple of odd reasons – the round characters look a bit like snails, and the name rhymes with art deco.

The demo version of the font can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.

Windlass Font Takes to the Road

Dave — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 05:51:30 +0000

I stopped into our local barbeque parlor for dinner this evening, and parked out front I found a stylishly decorated Mini Cooper wrapped with art promoting DragonsLair, Austin’s preeminent comic book and game emporium. Even better, the store logo featured on the car (one of two in a matched set) features our Windlass Font.

Because of the popularity of pirate themed books, movies and games, Windlass has recently become by far our most popular and bestselling font, supplanting Folkard which stole the title from Abaddon several years ago.

It was very cool to run into Windlass on wheels right in the little exurb of Austin where I live. It turns out that it was on the way to a live action roleplaying event at the nearby J. Lorraine Ghost Town just east of Manor, Texas.

Featured Font: Orphiel

Dave — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:47:11 +0000

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Script fonts can be a real challenge to design, especially when they are designed to have interconnecting characters which require exacting kerning and character positioning. When we first developed Orphiel we did a lot of kerning work on it, but despite a generally pleasing appearance, there were some inconsistencies in the kerning which were never really satisfactory. This kind of demanded a new release of the ornate and decorative script font with extra attention to the connections between the characters and adding even more kerning pairs.

The result is a new release of Orphiel which works even better than the original with some essential improvements which make it cleaner and better flowing. It’s a great font for formal documents, invitations and decorative uses where you need a fancy script style.

The demo version of the font can be downloaded for free. If you like it, you can download the full version with both character sets from our ONLINE STORE for just $24.

April Fools Highlights

Dave — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 06:50:48 +0000

Every year we try to amuse with some sort of April Fools prank. This year visitors to the site were first greeted by what looked like a hacker takeover, a modest joke, but we’ve done some even bigger and sillier things in previous years. Here are some examples preserved as best we could.

1998 April Fools Page
1999 April Fools Page.
2000 April Fools Page.
2001 April Fools Page.
2002 April Fools Page.
2003 April Fools Page.
2004 April Fools Page.
2006 April Fools Page.
2008 April Fools Page.
2009 April Fools Page.
2012 April Fools Page

Hope you find them amusing. 1998 and 2002 were probably the biggest hits – certainly my favorites as well. The 2002 page actually results in several calls from churches looking for baptismal fonts every year. Nothing is available for 2005 or 2007 because both of them consisted of joke fonts which did horrible things when you tried to use them.

Dave

Ornamental Borders by George Wharton Edwards

Dave — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 08:07:13 +0000

The Victorian tradition of coupling bad literature with great art and decoration has been a rich source of material for us. We found another resource in this tradition in the book A Checked Love Affair written (badly) by Paul Leicester Ford, with some unremarkable illustrations from Harrison Fisher (whose work is showcased in our American Beauties package), but redeemed by a really outstanding set of ornate, decorative borders and emblems by George Wharton Edwards.

We’ve brought these lovely victorian borders together into a special mini-package with four decorative emblems and six high resolution, detailed borders. In addition to 12 large size, high-resolution images it also includes cleaned up and ready to use versions of 10 color borders. The whole collection is available for just $10 and you can order it online from our site in our ONLINE STORE.

[Show as slideshow]

Austin Poster Scene

Dave — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 06:33:32 +0000

I didn’t get to go to the Flatstock Poster Show this Spring because I was out of town, but Austin is always a great town for show posters and I regularly come across interesting examples of local design, as happened today when I was out shopping for Easter trinkets at ToyJoy and noticed a couple of interesting posters from shows earlier this week in a window next door.

The two posters I picked up couldn’t be much more different.

One is a poster for what I think is a local literary magazine issue release party. I’ve never heard of Foxing Quarterly, but the cover with its retro soviet look and animal human hybrid characters was certainly pretty eye catching with nice contrasting colors and use of graphic elements.

The other poster has a much more traditional, letterpress style look, which isn’t surprising since I surmise that it’s derived from an Austin show poster from the 1960s. It’s for an Elvis retrospective with local rockabilly revivalist Ted Roddy. The poster was produced on the cheap – black and white xerox on copy paper – bu the look design is just right for a vintage show poster look. I just wish they had gone the extra mile and printed it on heavy weight color coated cardboard stock so that the materials matched the design.

The streets of Austin are like a gallery tour for the poster fan. You never know what you’re going to stumble across, but there’s always something new and interesting if you keep a look out.

E. J. Detmold Arabian Nights Illustrations

Dave — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 07:38:03 +0000

E. J. Detmold was an early 20th century illustrator most known for his nature illustrations, particularly of insects, in books like Fabre’s Book of Insects and The Life of the Bee. He also illustrated some fairy tale books, the most notable of which is his illustrated edition of the Arabian Nights with selected stories from the original Fitzgerald text. Detmold’s illustrations are rich in color and detail and include scenes from many of the most popular stories, including several in the Sindbad sequence. You can see richness and detail of the illustrations in the example to the right and the preview below will let you view smaller size samples of the whole set. The illustations also feature impressive decorative borders which can be useful art resources independent of the illustrations (you can see some samples below and to the right).

We’ve collected all of the color illustrations from Demold’s Arabian Nights into a special mini-package. In addition to 12 large size, high-resolution images it also includes cleaned up and ready to use versions of 10 color borders. The whole collection is available for just $10 and you can order it online from our site at: ONLINE STORE.

[Show as slideshow]