These are few of my favorites from some recent trips to antique stores. The second one is particularly interesting as it uses alternate sets of letterforms for some of the letters.

And I just loved the overall cover design of this little gem!

It’s not just books though that can provide some interesting text inspiration. This was on the side of an old tin.

And this was a on the top of a gorgeous, old cash register.

One of my absolute favorites though has to be this late 1800s, leatherbound copy of one Longfellow’s best remembered poems. The gilt of the letters has seen better days, but it’s no less a thing of beauty.

Also, I don’t have any of them on hand, but does anyone else enjoy studying the different cover styles through the decades? Some of the vintage scifi/fantasy books especially had some pretty wild looking cover art (C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy as printed in 70s, anyone?) and I find myself enjoying seeing if I can accurately guess when a book came out based on the style. What cover styles of the past decades or centuries do you find yourself drawn to when looking at old books?

Well, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go last weekend, but, since my art show was incredibly slow, I had to find some way to pass the time and chose to do some more typeface design sketching!

First though, I thought I’d show you the other steampunk font I said last time that I was working on. Well, I’m still working on int (haven’t gotten any further than before), but I took a picture of the work-in-progress anyway.

I’m a little stuck at the moment (turning gears into letterforms isn’t so easy), but it’ll get there eventually.

Here though is the one I was working on on Sunday!

As you can see, I got a little carried away with this one! Which I take as a good thing. I was enjoying the design so much that I expanded it with a few alternates (which I’ll likely expand on some more), ligatures (more might be coming of these too), and an actual small caps, lower case version. I’m also thinking of sketching out a normal lower case version as well as an alternate set of characters and haven’t gotten to sketching out the numbers, punctuation, and multilingual characters yet.

What do you think? So far I think this is my favorite of the design sketches I’ve made and I’m really looking forward to when I can start digitizing it at some point down the road!

I don’t know about you, but I love fonts! I’ve hoarded thousands of them on my computer and yet I’m still scouring my favorite font merchant sites for more. It’s gone beyond just hoarding other people’s fonts now though to the point that I’m starting to dip my toes into the wild river of typeface design and font creation and I fully expect to be swept away by it!

I briefly dabbled with it in the past with badly drawn letters in Inkscape and trying to use a crash happy Font Forge software to turn them into an actual font, but now I’m back to the idea as it still fascinates me. I’m coming at it a little differently now though. I’m building a visual library of beautiful, old letterforms by photographing the covers of beautiful old books in antique stores, flea markets, and anywhere else I find them along with any other ephemera or object with interesting text on it that might prove useful for inspiration. I’m also keeping an constant, longing eye out for the old type specimen books and the like, but, sadly, these are extremely hard to come across. However, I have a lovely little (not actually that little) digital library courtesy of my parents who gifted me a collection of digitized antique books on lettering, decorative penmanship, alphabets, and the like from the 1920s and as far back as the mid 1500s.

Just before my family went on vacation this year I printed out a bunch of pages from one of those books to start practicing and experimenting with ideas. Here are a couple of them.

And here’s my first very, very rough experimentation using these (and other) pages as inspiration.

It’s in need of a lot of work (height consistency is awful even with my vaguely sketched guidelines), but I actually kinda like where some of these letters were going. It’s technically an ‘all caps’ concept sketch, which is often the easiest to start with (or at least according to the books I’ve read on typeface design), but I still tried for an ‘upper’ version along with small caps.

My second design sketch ditched the books altogether and went in a very, very different direction! Steampunk.

Again, a lot of work is still needed before I can even consider bringing anything over for vectorizing and turning into an actual font, but I really rather like the idea of this one! I scoured the internet for reference pictures of old clock hands and worked off of them. I’m also working on a letterform design concept based on gears, but that one’s only partially sketched out right now.

So, what do you think? Back to the drawing board or do you think they have potential?