Fun Friday Resources: Fonts & Typefaces

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diagrammatic.jpg

Our theme this week is FONTS! I love typefaces — my girlfriend in high school actually gave me The World-Famous Photo Typositor Alphabet Library for my birthday one year — so whenever I come across a font website or even posts about typefaces, I go there.

Public Domain Review of course has dozens of images of antique font collections, so many that we’ve got an entire list from them for today:

  • The History of Ink: An advertising treatise; the first 78 pages are indeed a history of ink and writing instruments, but then we get all the plates of illustrations, and those are primo. It becomes a history of handwriting fonts.

  • The Diagrammatic Writings of an Asylum Patient: This one is interesting not for its fonts but for the artistic form these two illustrations take. I can see STEALING FROM THE BEST as a strategy here: can you create something like this?

  • Specimens of chromatic wood type, borders, etc. manufactured by Wm. H. Page & Co.: “Chromatic” type is type made up of two or more colors. Think: old-timey circus posters; our foreparents loved them some gaudy, for sure.

  • An Alphabet of Organic Type: A set of intricate capitals from 1650, in full Baroque swing. Also of note are the little figures the artist/engraver drew to fill in the white space.

  • The Model Book of Calligraphy: More than 180 pages of calligraphic samples, with brilliant illustrations added 30 years after the book’s creation. For the full book (at the Getty Museum’s site) see here. Scroll to the bottom to view all the pages; apparently the Getty scanned each one individually.

  • Hoefnagel’s Guide to Constructing the Letters: From the artist who illustrated the above book, a guide to the geometry of letters. Again from the Getty, the images go from pp. 1–5 of the link.

These kinds of resources are useful in several ways. If you’re a fontographer or a calligrapher, they are definitely worth a look for inspiration. Image-wise, they’re great sources for literally copying/pasting into your own works. (Use a program like Photoshop or Pixelmator to snag bits and pieces.) And finally, use them as sources to STEAL FROM THE BEST, especially the asylum patient’s diagrams and the early examples of handwriting in the history ink.