Dec. 2006 Design Trends: Holiday Fonts

When it comes to holiday typefaces, most people look for script designs, picture fonts, or decorative initials. We have a small assortment of each to show you below. We suggest using the fonts at large sizes for your invitations and other holiday projects.

Fete is a two-weight script family. Fete Regular presents itself as a distinctive script with an unusual luxurious flare, while Fete Super was deliberately designed to further express exuberance. The name comes from the French “fête” which means “festival.” Fete Super is a font that sparkles with the freedom and fascination of a wonderful festival of fireworks in celebration of something noble like Bastille Day.

Snowmany Snowmen features fifty (count ’em) Snow People, perfect for creating Seasonal Greetings for homemade Christmas Cards, decorating your children’s “Thank You” letters - or just printing them out for your kids to color while Uncle Frank’s shovelling out the driveway!

Contempo Elan is a new script that comes in two flavors. Contempo Elan Grand Script is an elegant, hip alternative to a more traditional formal script. Contempo Elan Ornamental is a festive calligraphic script, perfect for any holiday announcement that requires a classy, celebratory typeface design.

Flat10 Holly is a decorative pixel font for Flash and other graphic images. You should use it at a size of 10 pixels or at multiples of 10 (20, 30, 40, etc.).

LTC Holiday Ornaments features over 80 printers’ ornaments and covers many holidays including Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and more. There’s even a pirate to represent international “Talk Like a Pirate” day. LTC Holiday Ornaments joins the Lanston Collection alongside the popular Christmas Ornaments. LTC Holiday Ornaments contains additional Christmas ornaments as well.

Venice Initials are a redesign of a 15th-century Venetian original by an unknown calligrapher. They work well as drop caps and monograms. Use them at large sizes.

Be sure to check out our holiday fonts for all your seasonal events and projects.

Oct. 2006 Design Trends: Scary Fonts

Need Halloween fonts for invitations, posters, or flyers? MyFonts has a whole slew of text and picture fonts for your next scary event.

Beynkales from Scriptorium is based on the original title of Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride. Burton was using an outdated version of one of Scriptorium’s fonts for the interior titles. Scriptorium’s quest to get hold of Burton didn’t bear any immediate fruit, but in a totally unrelated event they were contacted by the graphic arts company working with the overseas distributors for The Corpse Bride, and it turned out that they needed a font based on the main title of the movie so they could keep the same style when they retitled it into other languages. The font was created from the sample in the original title. Scriptorium ended up calling it “Beynkales,” which means “Bone Bride” in Yiddish. So here it is in all its tattered glory!

Braaains BB is a monster collection of 53 all-original, all-terrifying zombie illustrations. Also included is a character map so you can pick that perfect undead dingbat!

Draculon is a casual font inspired by the letterforms of a humanistic font from 1904, which was in turn based on an Italian manuscript from 1485. The subject of the manuscript was probably something about vampires and pirates or even worse: the dreaded vampirates. Draculon is available in OpenType, Mac PostScript and Windows TrueType format. (Note: the OpenType format includes class-based kerning, common fractions, and 46 ligatures. Automated OpenType ligatures currently only work in Adobe CS products.)

Ahoy, matey! Catacumbes is a collection of skulls and bones, bones and skulls, and even a headless skeleton to put them all atop. Use them big on signs and posters.

Monster Mash is one of many Halloween fonts from Comicraft, which also include Goosebumps, Incy Wincy Spider, Rough Tongue, and Trick Or Treat, to name but a few.

Check out our scary fonts for all your Halloween events!

Sept. 2006 Design Trends: Three-Dimensional Fonts

Three-dimensional fonts provide ways to create 3d effects with stylish color palettes, as we show you with the fonts below:

Inspired by homemade garage sale signs, Brubeck’s Cube is a fun, hand-illustrated design, a poster font that communicates clearly in a humanist style.

3 D is a hand-doodled font with irrational perspective and skewed characters. The detail in each of this alphabet’s letters makes it look especially cool when displayed BIG. This unique alphabet makes excellent titles for journal and album pages, or can be used for all paper arts projects.

Penitentiary Gothic is a digital recreation of the letters used on California state license plates, designed in order to make props for movies and television shows. The regular style is meant to be used on its own, but the other four styles are meant to be used one on top of another in different colors to create an embossed 3D effect. For best results, use the fill style in a dark color on top of a light colored background. Put the lolite style directly on top of the fill style in 10 - 30% of the background color. Put the hilite style directly on top of that in 10 - 30% of your fill color. Put the shadow style directly on top of that using your background color plus 50 - 80% black.

Jeff Levine acquired a set of original water-applied decals made by the Duro Decal Company of Chicago (now Duro Art Industries) and painstakingly recreated one of the classic hand-drawn typefaces from the Duro line. Named after the street where the company is located, Juneway is an authentic reproduction for the computer-based designer.

Archive Tinted is an engraved display typeface from Archive Type, which specializes in old typefaces found in old prints, books and samples. Typefaces are reproduced as they appeared in print. This font and others from Archive Type allow you to bring an old-fashioned feel to new posters, newsletters, and designs.

Check out our 3d fonts for more three-dimensional designs. No Photoshop effects required!