Font of the Week #38: Event Horizon

   Hello! I hope you’ve had a great week and enjoyed your work holiday yesterday. This week’s font of the week is a fun one! So grab your astronaut helmet and let’s go!

Event Horizon

   The featured font for this week is a playful and retro Space Age design called “Event Horizon”. The font was inspired by a hand lettered advertisement from the 1960s. I took the few letters that appeared in the original sample and designed a full typeface from it.

   

   The font evokes the fun and innocent view that decades past had about the space age and the excitement surrounding it. With its “yesterday’s version of tomorrow” feeling it has more of Flash Gordon about it than Nasa. But that is exactly why I loved designing this font! As I’m sure you can tell, I’m a big fan of retro design. 

   The name comes from the theoretical horizon that forms around a black hole. Technically, it is the point where the escape velocity of the gravitional pull of the black hole becomes greater than the speed of light. It is the point of no return…the edge of the cliff so to speak. It’s not an actual physical surface, merely a point at which we can no longer see past. Once anything goes past that point it is forever cut off from our Universe. 

   The font was designed natively in OpenType in 2011, and includes an entire set of letters that have “speed lines” cut into them, under the Stylistic Alternates feature. This offers the user a fun and playful increase in functionality for the typeface. It gives that perfect high speed look!

   These speed lines are designed to alternately line up or not line up between letters which gives them a more dynamic appearance. As though the characters are speeding past a beam of light! This is also enhanced by the forward slant of the letters.

   Event Horizon is part of the Jukebox library sold exclusively through Veer. 

Font of the Week #37: Empyrean

  Hello again! It's always nice to see you back. Once again it's time for the font of the week and this time I am featuring my text family called “Empyrean”…

Empyrean

   The Empyrean font family represents the one and only time I set out to design an actual text face that could be used for printing books and or long passges of text. Most of the typefaces I design are meant for headline and display use, but I wanted to challenge myself to take on a text family which is a whole different animal.

   Empyrean is loosely based on the original hand-drawings for the “Romain du Roi” (French for ‘King’s Roman’) done in 1695 by Louis Simmoneau. King Louis XIV had ordered the design of a new royal typeface, and those original drawings came out of that process.

   I began working on Empyrean in early 2003. Originally the font had a different working name but I finally settled on calling it “Empyrean” just before releasing it commercially through Veer. The word Empyrean means “deriving from or related to heaven”…a seemingly appropriate name for a typeface based on a font made for the “Sun King”

   There are four weights in the Empyrean family…Roman, Bold, Italic and Swash Italic. The challenge in designing a text face like this is getting all of the four faces to work together harmoniously as well as tackle the specific needs of a typeface intended for text use. Designing fonts for display use is much more fun and free as the designer has more leeway into what can be done with the letters. Text faces must be designed and spaced very precisely. As any artist is never able to see his or her own work objectively (try as they might) I cannot judge if Empyrean is a success or not, but I was pleased with the end result and customers seem to like it. It was a fun challenge that I enjoyed! As to whether I would do a text family again? We’ll see…

   Each of the four weights in the Empyrean family can be purchased separately or the whole typeface family can be purchased at a lower price than 4 x the individual price. Empyrean is available in OpenType format from Veer.

   

   

Font of the Week #36: Eloquent Pro

   Hello! It's great to have you back again. This is a special week for two reasons. First, this is my first “Font of the Week” post for 2015 and second, this week’s font feature is very special. We will take a closer look at my font family called “Eloquent”.

Eloquent

  Back in late 2008 I received an email from Grant Hutchinson at Veer. Through the years, Grant and I had conferred many times on which font would make good additions to the Jukebox library. In this particular email, Grant suggestied that I take a look at and old photo-typositing face from the Photo Lettering Inc. library called “Pistilli Roman”. He sent me some samples along with the email.

   This beautiful did one style font had heavy contrast between thick and thin strokes and the thin strokes were like hairlines. The original Pistilli font had never been converted into digital format. Grant and I decided to recreate it and add it to the Jukebox library.

   I began work on this digital revival in early 2009 and it was finished later that same year. The original Pistilli Roman font was one roman face and despite much research I could never find an accompanying italic. As far as I know Pistilli never published one, so I set about designing one that would match to make a complete family set. I expanded the family to also include a small caps for both roman and italic and added a full set of swashes to each typeface.

   Eloquent has been a very popular seller for Jukebox and is one of my top 5 most successful typefaces. About a year after Eloquent was released to the public, I was contacted by Italian Vanity Fair to design a custom “caption” version for use at small print sizes. All versions are available from Veer.

   In addition to this, I was honored to have “Eloquent” chosen as one of the 25 winners of Communication Arts magazine ‘Best in Typeface Design’ for their 2011 Typography Annual. 

   Unlike some of the older Jukebox fonts which were later converted to OpenType, Eloquent was designed natively in this format. I made use of many of the special features of OT typefaces. Eloquent is part of the Jukebox library and is available from Veer. 

Font of the Week #35: Electroface

   Hello! I am returning to this blog after a month hiatus. I want to thank you for hanging in with me during my absence. The Font of the Week feature should now resume normally.

Electroface

   This week’s featured font is “Electroface” and is part of the Jukebox collection available from Veer. This font is a digital revival of an old typeface from the 1970s. I was unable to find a great deal of information on the original font as it appeared in an old Dover book on typefaces.

   What drew me to this typeface was its interesting geometric forms that seem to suggest electrical circuitry and transistor boards. That is also what inspired its name.

   It also seems to have a certain 1970s “disco funk” look to it that I find appealing. As a small child growing up in the late 1970s, I can remember typefaces like this in use on signs and various commercial products, so for me it has that retro nostalgia to it as well. 

   While the cut through lines in the letters ares suggestive of electrical circuits, the rounded corners and counterspaces give the fot an organic feeling that keeps it from feeling too severe. 

   This font would be the perfect typeface for any design that needs a retro feeling suggestive of the 1970s or early 1980s as well as possibly even a “constructivist” aspect to it. 

   As a digital revival, I began by reproducing the letters that appeared in the old Dover book in Adobe Illustrator and then importing them into FontLab. I then filled in the needed characters to make a full font such as accented letters and such. It is always fun to be able to add my own flair into a typeface so it is personalized despite being a digital revival.

   Electroface is now available in OpenType from Veer.com.

Font of the Week #34: Eastern Star

   Hello and welcome back! For this week’s Font of the Week we will be taking a closer look at “Eastern Star” from the Jukebox library…

Eastern Star

   This font was designed in 2006 and was inspired by a handlettered sample in an older how-to book from the 1940s on hand lettering for graphic artists. That particular book, I special ordered from a bookseller in Britain.

   I enjoyed both the calligraphic and asian qualities that this font has. It seems as appropriate for a Christmas card as it does for a menu at a Chinese or Polynesian restaurant. That is due to its “eastern” design elements, hence the name I gave it.

   For me, the font seems to call up images of nomads crossing the desert on camels. Perhaps to head east to trade with spices Asia or west to the holy land? Either way, there is a lot of versatility in this typeface for use on themed designs…

   For me type has always had an emotional connection and Eastern Star is no exception. The design of a typeface must evoke a feeling that relates to it. That is one of the reasons I am more geared toward designing display or headline fonts. Therein lies the wealth of emotion that type can convey.

   The font was originally released as a PostScript font but has now been updated to OpenType format. Eastern Star is available from Veer.com
 

Font of the Week #33: Dulcimer

Hello and welcome back again! I hope you are having a good Wednesday so far. This week's font of the week feature will be taking a closer look at my typeface called “Dulcimer”.

Dulcimer

   This font was inspired by a small sample of lettering in a how to book on calligraphy. Since there were only a few letters in the original sample, I took on the challenge of designing a full typeface from them with a sense of excitement!

   What I like about the design of this font is the thin, almost wispy letterforms. It goes against the grain of most typical “calligraphy” style fonts but still retains that hand-drawn organic quality that they are known for. I particularly like the variety of the lowercase letters. Most are designed in a more typical printed way while some have a more scripty design to them like the lowercase r and s. Allowing this intermixing while still retaining a cohesive design gives the font a definite feeling that it was hand drawn. The way letters widen on many of the end strokes as well as the small spaces between parts of the letters, gives the font a vaguely Asian feel with out being too overt about it.

   These qualities make Dulcimer a very versatile font that can work in a number of different applications.

   A dulcimer is a musical instrument that can be plucked or played with a hammer. It has a very unique sound quality to it that is very distinctive and lovely. It seemed the perfect name for this font. I remember the first time I ever saw a real dulcimer as a child. We were on vacation in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and there was a man who hand made them. He had a small shop in town and we happend to walk past it. He was playing outide and it was an amazing sound! I began working on the Dulcimer font in January of 2005. It was released as part of the Jukebox library at Veer later that year and is now available in OpenType.

 

Font of the Week #32: Debonair

   Hello and welcome to the first Font of the Week feature for November! This week we will take a closer look at “Debonair”—one of the earliest Jukebox fonts.

Debonair

   Debonair is a digital revival, meaning the Jukebox version is a recreation of an old typeface that was previously only available as a photo-typositing font. Once photo lettering went the way of the Dodo when computers and PostScript came along many of these older fonts were forgotten or fell out of use. Designers weren’t able to use them because photo lettering was gone and they hadn’t been converted into digital fonts for the computer.

   It has been something of a fun task for us digital typeface designers to bring these old fonts back to life again and make them available to designers of today. Debonair is a digital revival of an old script typeface called “Diane” which was originally designed by Roger Excoffon for the Olive Type Foundry in 1956. I created the digital version of this previously unavailable font in 2001 as part of the original JAW Fonts library which was later rebranded as Jukebox in 2003.

   What captured me about this interesting script font is the angular elements in the lowercase letters. Usually script fonts are meant to imitate the free-flowing forms of handwritten lettering, but in the case of Debonair, the lower case letter’s downward curves are angled off at a point…this gives the font a slightly edgy feel that is unique among formal scripts.

   Working from samples in an old type catalog, I traced each letter in Illustrator and then imported them into Fontographer to build the font up.

   Debonair is a Copperplate (or Spencerian) script as they are sometimes called. These elegant script fonts are based on lettering from the 18th Century and have always been associated with formality and refinement. They are perfect for wedding invitations and anything that needs a classy and elegant feel.

   As the Jukebox library was completely converted to OpenType in 2013, Debonair is now available as an OpenType font from Veer.