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.