This weekend I started plowing through the backlog of Fontleech email. Buried under all the Cialias and mortgage offers, I found some pretty sweet sites that you guys sent me. Nick Botner tipped me off to Fontscape, the work of Hiroki Tanaka. Hiroki’s got some nice work, especially MW Code. Check it out. And if you guys are looking a good source prescription drug source, just let me know.
Font-o-ville is a Dutch foundry offering some cool, original retro fonts for download. I like The Bends and the Orpheus family, a nice sans serif package that seems a little out of place thematically (not that I’m complaining). The site’s been lying dormant for a year and half, so who knows how long these fonts will be available.
How many fonts do you have on your computer?
How many of those fonts have you actually used?
Okay, so maybe not all April Fool’s Day web pranks are lame. Check out Fontleech favorite Eutypoce’s splash. This one had me confused for a second.
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Jack Usine’s SMeltery is a site I wish I’d found much sooner than this morning. Jack has designed some experiemental (yet very usable) fonts with the kind of craftsmanship rarely seen in the free font world. My favorite of his free fonts include ALusine, AUdimat, GAzole (pictured), KEbab and REdevance.
Jurgen Vanbrabant gets a big shout out for pointing out the site. Check out Jurgen’s stuff at brantt.be and hipatrip.com.
And I apologize for not having a bunch of lame April Fool’s posts like everyone else. I just wasn’t thinking ahead!
Kosuke Yamada is a Japanese type designer with a few free fonts available on his site Petitboys (?). Transport X and Funky House are nice, but Highway Star (the original, not the 2003 version) is definitely my favorite.
Comic book lettering used to be done in pencil and ink, right on top of the artist’s original drawings. This process wasn’t just slow, it was dangerous. One slip-up could ruin an entire page’s worth of work. These days, almost all comic letterers do their work in software like Illustrator where they can throw down speech bubbles and do their actual lettering as fast as they can cut and paste dialogue.
Of course, fanboys aren’t ready to see Wolverine’s cantankerous quips set in Futura, so a cottage industry of comic book type design has developed. Blambot offers a ton of their professional-grade lettering fonts for free, as well as some nice “sound fx” and “headline” typefaces.
Also very useful is their .eps file of speech bubbles which, if nothing else, can make for some entertaining photo captions for all those Easter pictures.
Thanks to the approximately one million people who have emailed me about Blambot since Fontleech’s very first day on the web.
If you’ve noticed a dovetail in the frequency of posts lately, it probably has something to do with the newest member of the family. I’ll be back up to speed soon.