Font of the Week #21: Candy Apple

   Hello and Happy Tuesday! This week’s font of the week is Candy Apple—a retro style font that is fun and happy–go–lucky!

Candy Apple

   Candy Apple is a fun and cartoony font that was inspired by a hand-lettered Halloween candy advertisement from the 1950s or 1960s. The original poster had a fantastic retro-style design to both the graphics and the lettering. Unfortunately the original photo of the poster has been lost, but I do remember those classic mid-century graphics.

   Two of my favorite things are retro style designs and Halloween (vintage Halloween in particular). It was only fitting that an ad poster having both qualities should inspire a font from me!

   Candy Apple is at first glance an all caps font, but this isn’t entirely so. A few of the lowercase letters have differing designs as you can see in this sample. However, I created the font so that the lowercase and caps were all the same height, allowing for intermixing within single words.

   Candy Apple is an inline font meaning there is a small interior line that follows the letterform. This gives the design an interesting 3D effect that makes the words appear to rise off the page…mostly because the inline is not centered, but positioned more to the left, suggesting perpective.

    Designed in 2009, Candy Apple is part of the Jukebox collection available from Veer and is available in OpenType format.

Font of the Week #20: Swashington — New from CounterPoint!

   Good day! I hope you are having a nice week so far. This week’s font of the week features the brand new, just released design from CounterPoint Type…my new “Swashington” font.

   This font was inspired by a hand drawn logo that contained about six letters. While nothing is known about the original designer, I believe the lettering to be from the 1970s. The rendering of the original logotype is inconsistent across differing uses, so I am unsure as to how it was reproduced.

   I was moved to develop this into a full typeface after cleaning up the letterforms a bit. I find the combination of 1970s design with its Art Nouveau undertones to be an interesting mix.

   This was one of those typefaces that was just pure fun to design! I am passionate about type design which gives me joy no matter what font I am working on, but I love doing these kinds of fonts. I love swashes and this was a great ride to create! I started by redrawing two of the swash characters and one ligature from the original logotype. Next came developing the regular non-swash letters that are the base of the typeface. Once this was done I moved onto the really fun part which was all the swashes and alternate ligatures!

   The font contains both individual swash alternates for all the letters as well as over 270 alternate ligatures that combine two or more letters together. The letters in the ligatures differ from the plain swash variants and are specifically design to interlock in a pleasing way. This way the user can mix and match different combinations for a wide variety of possibilities. 

   This available variation makes the font quite versatile and you can get a lot of mileage out of it in different applications. Besides it’s loads of fun just to play around with the different combinations until you find the one that is your favorite!

   I chose the name for this font because it is a fun play on the name Washington. It came to me one evening and seemed to be perfect for the design.

   Swashington is available from MyFonts.com and FontHaus as well as directly from myself at an introductory price of only $29.25.

   In addition to this, all fonts from Counterpoint Type studio are currently on sale at 35% off now through July 31st. It’s my Summer Savings special!

Jukebox font sighting! Stephanie Marie

   The other day I was in Barnes and Noble and happed to run across this romance novel with Stephanie Marie on the cover!

   As always, it is so much fun to see my font designs out in the world! Stephanie Marie has been one of my most popular designs over the last ten years. It was named after a dear friend of mine.

“Stephanie Marie” sample from Veer.com

Font of the Week #19: Cabernet Regular and Italic

   Good morning! Here we are at another Tuesday so it’s time for the Font of the Week. This week’s font is the “Cabernet” family from Jukebox…one of my favorite digital revivals that I have created.

Cabernet Regular and Italic

   The Cabernet family from Jukebox consists of two “pro” OpenType fonts that were adapted from an original set of four PostScript fonts. The swash variants that used to be in separate font files are now included in the OpenType versions, making the fonts much easier to use.

http://marketplace.veer.com/font/Cabernet-Complete-JBT0001090

   Cabernet is a digital revival of an old photo-typositing face based on heavy weight supposedly Caslon-style type. However, this font has a lot of Modern attributes to it…the heavy contrast between the thick and thin strokes as well as the vertical stroke axis. It does however retain the bracketed serifs of Caslon (Transitional) types.

   These types of font are fantastic for display usage and they were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s giving them a look that seems to fit with that era. Particularly when the Swash variants are used. There is nothing more fun than designing swash letters to go with a font. They add vigor and liveliness to a typeface, and the Cabernet fonts are no exception.

   These fonts were created in the spring of 2003 and released commercially from Veer as part of the Jukebox library that summer. They can be seen in the September 2003 catalog where they were used extensively. Veer used to send out beautifully printed catalogs each month which unfortunately are no longer produced.

   The Cabernet fonts are widely recognizable, as the original photo-typositing fonts they were based on were used for the posters for the 1974 film “Foxy Brown” (among many others!). These types of serif swash fonts are among my favorites as they connect me with my first memories of admiring typefaces when I was a child.

   Cabernet Regular and Italic are part of the Jukebox library and are available from Veer.com