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.
Classic Font: Black Cow...
Black Cow was originally developed back in 1998 as an addition to our Horror Fonts and Art collection. It has since been through several revisions with the addition of lots of alternate character forms. It's a super quirky font with very [...]
New Font: Treadway...
Treadway is a new, original design in the tradition of futuristic advertising scripts of the mid-20th century, inspired by fonts like Kaufmann and Gillies, but with a stronger, more clearly defined look, stripped down to its most st[...]
New Font: Scrapple...
Scrapple is a new font based on the idea of constructing characters from a limited selection of wood blocks featuring round and rectangular shapes. Scrapple has a cool, crude and industrial look. It's all uppercase, but the lowercase[...]
Featured Font: Bridgeport...
Bridgeport was first released in 2003 and is one of several fonts based on lettering by legendary artist and calligrapher Eric Sloane, including Queensland and Guilford. Bridgeport has the look of hand lettered capitals, with strong [...]
Classic Font: Goodfellow...
Goodfellow was first released in the spring of 1993. It was based on Art Nouveau period metal type designed for titles and logos. It became a surprise hit when Tim Burton used it as the title font for his hit animated film A Nightmare Bef[...]
Classic Font: Lachesis...
Lachesis was one of our earliest text font designs, a unique font deliberately designed to have an antique wood-cut look. It is based on samples of vintage type taken directly from letterpress type blocks found at the type museum in [...]
New Font: Shayne...
BUY NOW TRY DEMO Custom Preview We've featured some articles on the designs of pulp novel covers from the mid-20th century, including s look at the fonts used in those designs. We've also released fonts based on those[...]
Classic Font: Swithin...
Swithin was designed to be our featured holiday font for 2003. It is based on samples of advertising lettering from posters produced during the 1920s. The whimsical nature of the characters and the decorative elements make it an exc[...]
New Font: Beaumains...
We've done a number of fonts based on lettering by vintage calligrapher and design historian J. M. Bergling, including several with an Art Nouveau flavor like Boetia and Belgravia. Our newest font is in that same tradition, but it [...]
Walter Crane Initials and Orname...
It has taken a lot of hours of development, but we finally have our promised Walter Crane Initials font. Or should I say FOUR fonts, because in the process of developing the font it turned out that we ended up with more [...]
Featured Font: Locksley...
BUY NOW TRY DEMO We have done a number of fonts based on unique, historic movie titles. The most well known and widely circulated is our Captain Kidd font, but we have another historic movie font based on an even more f[...]
Featured Font: Melcheburn...
Melcheburn is a really handsome calligraphic font which we first released in 2000 and which has been revised twice since then. It has character forms which are more decorative than classic black letter fonts, with embellished capitals[...]
New Font: Rodchenko...
Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) was one of the premier artists of the constructivist movement in Russia. Although he was a sculptor, painter and photographer, he is most remembered for his graphic design style in book and poster desig[...]
Classic Font: Padstow...
In the week leading up to St. Patrick's Day it's all about Celtic design, so our featured classic font has to be something with a Celtic theme. That being the case, there's no better choice than our bold and beautiful Padstow font. It[...]
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 i[...]
Featured Font: Chaillot...
Chaillot is based on 12th century gothic calligraphy which has some characteristics of early black letter calligraphy and stylistic holdovers from late Carolingian lettering. It is a very bold and distinctive calligraphic style with u[...]
New Font: Leodegar...
Leodegar is based on samples of 7th century Frankish hand lettering. The characters draw on the minuscule calligraphic tradition, but are a bit more decorative and somewhat whimsical. They occupy an appealing position somewhere betwee[...]
New Font: Plymouth...
As you may have noticed we've been doing fonts off and on for several years based on the hand lettering of early 20th century sign-painter Frank Atkinson. Past fonts based on his lettering include Atkinson Eccenteric, Atkinson Boomtown and[...]
Classic Font: Black Cow...
Black Cow is a unique original font designed for our Horror Fonts and Art collection several years ago. It's one of the most interesting fonts in the large selection of fonts in that package, but it hasn't had the huge level of popul[...]
Featured Font: Rosalinde...
Rosalinde was first released in 1999 and it was one of our first attempts at an informal handwriting-style font. It is a bit more than just a regular handwriting font. It has some stylized characteristics and unusual character forms[...]
Classic Font: Paleos...
We originally released Paleos back in 2002. It was inspired by kinds of titles used for B grade movies in the cavegirl/junglegirl genre. Movies so bad that they're good in a way that appeals to cult movie fans. The concept is that the[...]
New Font: Alcuin...
We're working on a number of projects based on designs by legendary 19th century codicologist Owen Jones, who is most famous for his Grammar of Ornament. One of those projects is his book One Thousand and One Initial Letters from 18[...]
Classic Font: Alecto...
Alecto was originally released in 2002 and was one of the fonts developed for our Futuristic Fonts package. It has a unique science fictional look, combining some of the look of an OCR font with pure fantasy elements. It's just the k[...]
The World of Steampunk
Steampunk is an increasingly popular literary genre which explores science fiction themes from the perspective of the Victorian era and based on technology extrapolated from the science and engineering capabilities of the 18th and 19th centuries. It has its earliest roots in the speculative writing of Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle. It emerged as a distinct modern literary movement in the 1980s with the work of writers who were influenced by Michael Moorcock, Philip K. Dick and the New Wave science fiction of the late 1960s and 1970s, which turned into the cyberpunk genre by the 1980s. Cyberpunk in turn begat steampunk which appealed to many of the same writers and attracted its own following by the end of the decade.
The first clearly identifiable steampunk novel is James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus, published in 1986 (the current edition features our Norumbega font on the cover), though some elements of the genre are foreshadowed in his novel The Digging Leviathan
which was published two years earlier. The genre became more clearly defined with the publication of The Difference Engine
by cyberpunk masters William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in 1991. From that point more authors were attracted to the themes they explored and the genre began to expand, attract a following and become influential. As the genre developed, common themes began to emerge, including some emphasis on the impact of science and industry on the environment, the blurry line between science and magic and the dehumanizing role of technology. Much steampunk writing has a strong element of luddism in it and an interest in alternative technologies which fell by the wayside in the modern era like airships and complex clockwork devices.
The movement has spawned a Steampunk comic book, a Steampunk Magazine
, several anthologies of short fiction and a large number of novels of various levels of quality, aimed at both adults and younger readers. The imprint of steampunk can be found on other novels — especially fantasy novels — which are not strictly of the genre, like Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass
and its sequels. Greg Keyes Age of Unreason
series is also heavily influenced by steampunk, taking a similar style into a slightly earlier era to have fun with the science of the enlightenment. There are even a few movies which have had their style and themes shaped by the Steampunk movement like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
and the animated feature Steamboy
. Not surprisingly there is also a Steampunk roleplaying game
based on the GURPS game system. Steampunk has become a popular and even pervasive genre with an influence which goes far beyond its literary origins. It’s gone so far that there are even steampunk conventions.
Perhaps most interesting is that Steampunk has inspired a powerful design movement. It may currently be somewhat underground and avant garde, but the Steampunk influence is becoming widespread. There is Steampunk art and clothing and graphic design. You can find a good overview of Steampunk design at the WebUrbanist blog. Outsapop Trashion has an excellent article on Steampunk themed fashion design and you can find incredible photos of some very creative clothing designs on the Steampunk Fashion Flickr group. For some reason all steampunk fashion must be accessorized with goggles. On Etsy.com you can find all manner of Steampunk themed jewelry, props and fashion accessories for sale at some very reasonable prices. You can find lots of good articles on steampunk design at Steampunk Workshop which has some coverage of Dave Veloz’ unique steampunk Mac Mini redesign. And don’t miss the most bizarre item of all, a Steampunk style computer which also brews beer. Steampunk design is all gears and levers and brass, but it has a unique look which is both antique and futuristic at the same time and is very appealing.
Now, you may wonder why I’m going on daftly about this strange and intriguing literary and design movement. Ponder the implications and if you check back in over the next couple of days the significance of all of this will become very clear.
January 7, 2009 | Filed Under Articles
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Folkard Font featured in Bard's ...
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[...] you aren’t familiar with steampunk literature and steampunk style, take a look at our recent overview article. It’s a world of gears and sprockets, brass and leather and rust and polished woods. [...]
just a quick observation, based on knowing nothing about Steampunk: N. Tesla would get my vote for being the ideal progenitor of this trend.
Jules Verne is considered the progenitor of steampunk, though the term wasn’t actually coined until the 80′s by K. W. Jeter attempting to find a name for the style of stories written by himself and a few other writers working in the victorian sci-fi/gaslight style. Check out the steampunk Wiki…
Hello here are some of the best Steampunk photoshop tutorials if you are interested on how are done exactly
i have tried without any success yet !!
http://freeitsolutions.com/photoshop/?search=steampunk