...fonts, that is. My 25th consecutive Thursday Thirteen features 13 interesting, fun, or bizarre font faces.

Apr 18, 2007

Thursday Thirteen 89::25: Thirteen Faces

I'm not a font specialist, by any stretch of the imagination. I know a small bit about how modern font faces are constructed, which looks better in print versus web and why, how to calculate point and pica size, and a few other odd bits of information. I've even managed to do some pretty creative things with the various dingbat and foreign fonts that are available via the web. However, if someone bought me the nicest, slickest, most intuitive font creator package available, I wouldn't be able to do a thing. I have great respect for the skill of anyone who creates a font from scratch. Here are some of my favorite font faces:

1. Cobb Shinn Stock Fonts, 1920s and 1930s woodcut art turned into font faces by font artisan Jeff Levine. Reminiscent of the "Monopoly" characters, in style, the forms cover the whole spectrum. There are even holiday-themed Cobb Shinn fonts available out on the web.
   
2. ...or, actually, just about anything by Jeff Levine. I could easily populate this entire list with dingbat (decorative) font faces this man has created and made freely available. One of my site designs used graphics created solely from his dingbat fonts. This is a varied, amazing collection. I've done some pretty interesting things with the Floor Tiles and Sun Dings fonts, a filter or masking layer, and a layer tweak or distortion.
   
3. Luc Devroye's Sugaku fonts. The word 'sugaku' means 'mathematics' in Japanese; and each of these dingbat fonts is very clean, precise, and elegant. These symbols could be used as bullets, chapter- or post-enders, title embelleshments...and those are just the obvious uses. (Luc Devroye also provides a gigantic page of link references. Some lead to sites about the art and science of typography; but many lead to additional font archives.)
   
4. Walrod, Codex, and Roughwork are all similar fonts: they all 'rough out' the symmetry and construction of serif font items. But each is just slightly different. I've used them primarily for sites dealing with some form of design or development.
   
5. Listemageren created and distributed postcardware fonts in the early 90s: Mythago, Ornamentals, Listemageren Dings, Fantomet... His decorative, alphabet, and dingbat fonts are available through this site.
   
6. I found University Roman Normal several years ago, when creating a web design for a wedding planner/florist. I was asked to match the font face in some printed materials she had, and this was the closest I found. (She didn't know the font name, only that she liked it and had used it extensively...so it was a case of matching pre-existing branding.) University Extended seems to be related, but has wider letterforms than University Roman Normal.
   
7. I actually studied the Tengwar Quenya and Tengwar Sindarin spoken and written language forms - albeit very briefly - in one of my first-year linguistics courses. I downloaded both fonts in the mid-90s, before the Lord of the Rings movies were really known as being in development - at least among all but the diehard fans, studio insiders, and ever-hopeful conspiracy theorists. Since they're similar to runes, I've occasionally used a character here or there as background 'visual noise'. The linked site offers Tengwar Quenya and Sindarin fonts, along with several other freeware fonts based upon other versions of scripts used in Tolkien's books.
   
8. I am a geek, I am a science fiction fan, I like angular letter forms, so of course my collection includes the Blade Runner Movie Font.
   
9. Speaking of angular font forms, three more in my collection are Roar, Abaddon, and Morpheus. Roar, based on the font used in the 1995 TV series, is a bit more ornamental than the other two. Morpheus is featured in many "Gothic" font collections, while Abaddon is midway between the two: more curved like Roar's letterforms, but with cleaner lines and lighter strokes.
   
10. I taught myself calligraphy in the early 80s, but most of those letterforms I learned were too...familiar. I like the differences in the “eastern”, cursive scripts. Some examples in my own collection are Arabian, Bavand, and Jerash Demo.
    
11. Using dingbat fonts for ornamental accents is always fun. I'm one of those odd folks who would spend hours poring through a new dingbat archive, looking for possible decorative elements. How helpful, then, to find a font actually called Deco Borders.
    
12. I haven't actually found a use for this font face...but since the Mission-style box design aesthetic seems to be making a comeback, perhaps I'll have one soon? (Sadly, I don't remember where I found this font, and wasn't able to find it using Google. The file name is, simply, "glass.ttf".)
    
13. My collection also includes several foreign fonts: Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Syriac, Tsolyani, Torah Sofer, pseudo-cuneiform, and more. I've been very cautious about using them, though. I know how easy it can be for someone to use a nice-looking, but slightly embarrassing (or just plain amusing) character or glyph.

So what fonts do you really like? Got links to them (if they're public domain)?

Other Participants

• Di's Book Blog with things she didn't have growing up, that her own kids take for granted
• J's Thoughts and Musings with thoughts about our social welfare options...and, sometimes, the lack thereof
• This Eclectic Life with life lessons
• Tennessee Text Wrestling with thoughts on being married for ten years (congratulations!!)
• Wylie's Words with alternative uses for hot, sexy postcards
• A little piece of me with things she's learned about, and while, blogging
• BecKaDoodles with a photo eulogy for Oliver, her cat
• CraZedMoM with a post-storm wrap-up
• Writing Aspirations with what tarot cards reveal
• Scribbit with the best remade songs of all time
• The Screaming Pages with quotes from independent films
• The Flatland Almanack with lessons learned about weddings
• Books. Lists. Life. with pet peeves
• Heather Rae Scott with misadventures in furniture-moving
• Angelle Trieste on why she hates turning 29.
• It's all gone tits up with cosmetics she (over)bought [I feel for you - I have far too many different bottles of nail polish.]
• Joystory, having problems with a cranky laptop and a disobedient power cord

Keywords: | Thursday | television | memes | gothic | fonts | fantasy | dingbats | cursive |
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