Liberation by Brian Slattery (via The Contextual Life)
Book Cover: Liberation
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Category Archives: typography
Two Sketchy Fonts
This is a neat idea – two complimentary “sketch” fonts for doing layouts, or whatever. It’s now easier than ever to make stuff that looks authentic and hand drawn, without wasting all that time on actual drawing! No, but seriously, I think these are kind of cute. And they’re free – download 3dumb and 2dumb here.
More Yummy Type
All this typey goodness comes from typeverything.com. Check them out.
A Good Deed Brightens a Dark World by Jon Contino
Scarlet City, Bitter Sea book cover by Natalie Sklobovskaya
The Weird Turn Pro by Nathan Manire
Sunday Type
Faithful by Jeff Rogers
Imaginary Cities
Ben Didier of Vancouver, BC does wicked lettering jobs. Do I love this? Yes. Yes I do.
See more on his Pretty/Ugly Facebook page. (via typeverything.com)
Lovely Ornamental Accolades
Astype Ornaments Font
FontShop has a new set of blotts & flourishes called Ornaments Accolades, designed by Andreas Seidel of the Astype foundry in Germany. The accompanying PDF files (see links, below) function as a lovely specimen book on how to use ornaments.
Not only is there a nice clean version of each font, there is also a distressed, grungy version – yum 
Although you can order them through either FontShop or the Astype website, $50 for an ornaments font does seem a bit steep, does it not? However, the PDF samples packages are included in the font packages in PDF as well as InDesign CS3 format, with lots of ready-made borders, which is a nice touch.
Check out the PDFs – Accolades C is my favourite:
Accolades A – Accolades B – Accolades C
Facebook Studio Live NYC
Aside
From the Facebook Studio Live NYC photo album.
Setting Letterpress on Your iPad
LetterMpress is looking for Kickstarter funding. They’re developing a program that would let you use traditional letterpress tools to set type on your iPad. I was wondering why they want to raise $15,000, when it looks like the app is already in beta testing – but if you watch the presentation, their ultimate goal is to purchase and warehouse the letterpress type so that users can send in their designs for real-life inking. (The program will also produce a digital “print” file at high resolution for use in other applications).
As someone who loves these old-school kinds of processes but whose mechanical fixer-upper skills don’t progress much beyond bench knocking (not as dirty as it sounds), I think this app is going to be a lot of fun when it comes out…
Fruit Crate and other Vintage Labels
Found this site courtesy of a fellow blogger but now I am unable to track down who exactly it was. Apologies but I will share regardless. This site is a treasure trove of inspiration….
Love the hand-lettered type on these ones…
The BC Fruit Growers logo, omnipresent on apple stickers
ever since I can remember…
Animals are popular. The Blue Goose label is one of my favourites, although the cat looks like he’d take a swipe at you if you reached for that lemon.
Classy racetrack label, though not for a fruit crate.
Rooster label, looking vaguely Arm & Hammer.
I’m not sure whether they have the girl or the horse on display here…
Diagonal lines of type are also a theme…
Love the lemon sunburst in the background on this one.
This one below reminds me of Soviet propaganda poster type. Note that they seem to have used (or re-used) the same lemon illustration on the above & below labels.
This one also looks vaguely communist (sans diagonal type). I find this interesting only because I’d like to know what date the labels were in use, and whether they were changed or phased out post-WWII.
I find this one interesting because it looks like a contemporary logo that’s been designed to look like a vintage logo. According to The Label Man, however, it is the real thing. I think it’s due to the two-color treatment, the dingbats and the type of fonts used – this style of vintage would be easy to re-create on a computer. The other ones, not so much.
And lastly… let’s ride off into the sunset with a great old western movie tribute.
Foxtail Type Gallery
I snapped this photo on the way home from Edmonton this summer. It’s funny in a type-geek kind of way – typographic commandments in the landscape. Thou shalt KERN! But probably that’s just the name of the people who own the farm. I love seeing old elevators re-used this way.
Moreover, I finally posted my gallery of type photos on my Foxtail Facebook page. I’ve been meaning to put up a type photo gallery as part of my Foxtail website (which has been “under construction” for EVER). But I never could decide exactly what I wanted to DO with the website, and that seems to change month to month, so the Facebook page is the perfect place for it.
Type Galleries > Foxtail on Facebook