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: 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. |
GET DEATH RAY |
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