Proposal for a new group typeface intiative

Hiya—

MarcT had mentioned his fondness for some of the old William Morris cuts, and I've got almost complete alphabets—Q, X and Z seem not to be popular, thus no examples to be found—for Morris, Jensen, and a few other notable resources.

They're all from the 1900 American Type Founders Cut Book, which was a catalog for printers. 112 years ago makes the contents Public Domain.

Here are a few samples, and we mustn't forget the ornaments they used. I'm not thinking "typeface" here per se—more like a collection of decorative initials to kick off a page with a drop cap, you know?

Attachment 89360

Attachment 89361

Let's please not jump in and discuss dates and who's going to do what, okay? This is a field trip!

I'd just like to hear some opinions. Christine, this might fulfill (sort of) the initiative you were tossing out about a week ago.

My Best,

Gary

one of my A&C links
http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appre...am_morris.html

Gary perhaps these Capitals could become additions to the Designs Gallery > Clipart > letters collection?

Or how about a TG Collaborative Clip art Collection that could be published in the clip art gallery? Perhaps we could have as well as a .xar format (that can easily be added to the designs gallery) .pdf or .svg formats too? Thoughts?

Sounds good to me.

Christine

@Bill—

That's handsome artwork, those ornamental caps, for sure, Bill.
My only reservation might be: I can't get a good look, but that appears to be stippling within the characters. If so, that would be wicked hard and time-intensive to reproduce as vectors, no?

I think it's great to provide the graphics community with ornamental caps as clipart. I suggest both XAR and PDF, because PDF is marginally easier to import into Xara, Illustrator, CorelDRAW, and possibly Inkscape, haven't checked.

I'd like to suggest a sort of balance as we move forward with group projects.

When something is way complicated, like one of the gylphs from the Burgeon set that has 4,000 control points, a reproduction is more appropriately created as a vector file.

When the gylphs are reasonably simple, I suggest going the typeface distribution route is preferred, because a typeface can be shared across platforms, and because a collection of glyphs can't be separated accidentally.

And there's no rule that the stuff we are allowed to trace has to be curve-for-curve. Here's an example of two variations on the Bradley ornamental caps I posted.

Attachment 89381

My Best,

Gary

It all sounds good to me.

The typefaces looks really good!

Is it better to trace or redraw for such a project?
I guess a combination of both would work best...


Interesting elements to color and render also!

Marc

@Gary - the stipling is an artifact of the bitmaps used in the Gallery display. Not something I would recommend for us to try and duplicate. :D

@MarcT—

I'll share with you what I do to clean up a bitmap original:

I use an auto-trace utility (specifically Vector Magic), and then lock the result on the Guides layer. By default you got snapping going on, so essentially I let Xara snap my trace close to the auto-trace.

Then I hide the Guides layer, and clean up the trace manually.

Believe it or not, it creates accuracy and eliminates guesswork.

Only on rare occasions do I attempt a resurrection without any reference.

My Best,

Gary

Thanks for sharing your lore Gary!

I never think of using guide layers, they must be very useful in this kind of situation.

Marc

They are and they aren't Marc.

I think there's an option to shut off snapping for Guides, but I've not been motivated enough to find it! So snapping is a blessing and also a curse.

BTW, you need to create a Guides layer before you can use it: just drag a guide from a ruler and then you can treat this new layer almost exactly as any other.

You might see shortly, because I just sent Bill Taylor a master guide document for all new fonts. We need to establish, and then abide by a consistency so the glyphs all have uniform stems.

My Best,

Gary

Marc the attached png shows the guide lines and text Gary placed in the .xar file to be used as a font creation template.

If we are going to produce these ornamental caps as clip art I think it might be an idea to include svg as well because Web Designer MX premium can now import svg files and whenever there is a new version of Designer pro released it usually includes all the new features of the premium version of WD so it is quite possible that it will be able to import svg files too.

As well Inkscape, Blender, and probably other programs can import svg files