tentative specifications
I sure looked at a lot of fonts today.
This morning’s ‘playing with techniques for Drowning City’ turned into ‘picking fonts for Drowning City’.
Walt Kelly’s work taught me the power of careful font choice in comics; a generation of web cartoonists picking fonts from the wide assortment of Internet Novelty Fonts available for free taught me to put some thought into those choices. So once I arrived at the idea that the elves would speak in a ‘prettier’ font than the humans, I spent most of the day looking at calligraphic fonts to find just the right one.
I ended up spending a hundred bucks on a couple of good prospects. Nothing makes me feel more like a grown-up than spending money on The Right Font.
I am aware the calligraphic swashes make the elven dialogue a little harder to read. I kinda don’t care; I just really love the idea that their speech gets more precise when they want to emphasize a word. That really fits with how I envision these folks - concerned with appearances, to a fault. And seriously, someone who can pronounce ‘and’ in such a way that it’s rendered on the page as an ampersand? That is someone who is pretty persnickity about their words.
I am sort of hoping to keep on doing little style experiments and guides like this every now and then, so that when I finish Rita I’ll be able to jump into drawing pages of Drowning City with a nicely-curated set of the myriad tools Illustrator offers.
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.