Proposal for a new group typeface intiative

[Gare]

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?





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

[mwenz]

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

[Soquili]

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

[angelize]

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?

[Christine Farrelly]

Sounds good to me.

Christine

[Gare]

@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.



My Best,

Gary

[wizard509]

It all sounds good to me.

[MarcT]

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

[Soquili]

@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.

[Gare]

@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