Free versal…

erhaps nothing brightened old manuscripts like a versal, or illuminated large, initial cap. Jessica Hische offers a beautful array of fancy lettrines along with code that will create a mortise and place a drop cap in your blog. Go ahead; illuminate your next post!

The fleurons are lovely this time of year…

Just as some of us use italic ampersands in order to liven up dreary type, designers sometimes turn to ornaments in order to embellish text. In the past, red was the preferred color for fleurons, because red was so often set up as the second color on a two-color print run. Dingbat fonts aren’t very interesting, and Adobe Wood Type Ornaments have been raided with embarrassing frequency, but if one keeps one’s eyes peeled, there are other typographic elements which can be employed as decorations.

I recently found an upper case V in a Spencerian script font, which worked well as ornamental brackets for a logo which was done in Roman small caps.

By converting type to vector paths, one can reshape type, combine letters, extend swashes and modify terminals. Sometimes, one might even create a fleuron where none existed before.

Icons and needlepoint, one pixel at a time…

I recently created two bitmap ornaments for our website. Instead of the usual fleuron as a typographic decoration, Lynn Harvey, our resident electronic design expert, asked for a standard 16 x 16 pixel gif of something new. I settled on a scallop. I reduced a photo and traced one vertical half of it pixel by pixel. I deleted the photo, adjusted the colors and copied, pasted, horizontally flopped the vertical half and abutted it with the original. Fun work!

Recently, someone working on a website asked me for a “fist”— an old typographic convention that looks like a pointing hand. There ought to be scores of good fists out there, right? Well, I had no luck in a Google image search, so I decided to create an original. I thought of the ingenious set of icons designed for Apple’s first graphic user interface by Susan Kare, and started looking at photos. Pointing hands are horizontal, so the first order of business was to “condense” horizontally. The coloring is also abbreviated, so it must be intensified. I saved the gif with a transparent background, so the fist can be dropped into any html design.