Kate Godfrey

Beware the font that thinks too much of itself. Case in point: Dactylographe, a shareware TrueType font that has been on offer on PCWorld.com since 1997 with the bold claim that it is the champion to replace Courier as a text face.

Dactylographe is a demo, a one-font character set meant to give readers a taste for the full package of weights. The style borrows from the original Bodoni, a face designed by Giambattista Bodoni around 1798. The Bodoni style is drawn with less blocky serifs than Courier and with high contrast between the thick and thin strokes. "The font [Dactylographe]," designer Michel Bujardet writes, "has a much better rendition on paper…makes it a good candidate for printouts, where Courier does not do the job."

Deep in the crypt that is the PCWorld Downloads font database hides a little $4 shareware collection designed by Audio Electric Systems and aptly named Graveyard Font Collection. Graveyard, Headstone, and Tombstone make up the set. Together or apart this trio of display fonts is a fine choice for autumn entertaining, particularly if you like to set monograms like R.I.P.

Halloween revelers coming over? Knock 'em dead with typography in the three funerary fonts of Graveyard Font Collection.Graveyard, the first set, features single characters and numerals from the Warlock font set--a chiseled Gothic Sans in two variations--plain and engraved. In Graveyard, Warlock characters are rendered in plain black inside the outline of a simple iconic grave maker. The Headstone set uses Stonecutter, Warlock’s fancier twin. (Warlock and Stonecutter, also from AES, are bundled together in the Warlock TTF Collection.) Weight has been added to each letter’s outline on the left side to mimic carved letters. Headstone’s markers. match the more elaborate character style. Last in the line-up, the Tombstone set reverses plain Warlock letterforms out of inky black markers set in tufts of grass—a nice graphic touch best seen in sizes above 160 points.

The season of novelty typefaces looms before us and so does the perfect time to rescreen a vintage horror film. I'll be announcing my screening of B-Movie Producer Roger Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea with Ghoulish, a free font designed Canadian art director Gary Pullin, a man who takes unnatural delight in putting the chill into a serif.

Within Ghoulish, a ragged hyphen becomes a design feature even as a change in scale turns caps into a second level of emphasis.Ghoulish began life not as a font, but as a series of drawings for a layout in Rue Morgue, a publication exclusively devoted to horror in culture and entertainment. Art Director Pullin was aiming for the shock-factor of Corman film titles of the 1960's. Inspired by Damaged Goods, a font by Rotodesign, the art director drew the letters he needed by hand--adding creepy serifs and skewing the finished letters to stagger zombie-like above and below the baseline. The result was a fit for his pages, but far from a font until Chad Savage, a one-man design agency for the horror house industry, called to see if Pullin’s design was available for his own work.

Canadian font designer Peter Rempel brings his love of handwritten letterforms to the screen with a free download of PR Uncial, a playful introduction to the art of calligraphic forms.

PR Uncial brings medieval style to the screen with bold, round strokes.Time was when letterforms came about from hand and nib not click and pixel. Beginning around 200 AD, a particular style known as Uncial was the go-to choice of scribes writing out Latin and Greek texts. Uncial relies on simple, rounded strokes from a pen held in one position.

Canadian font designer Peter Rempel brings his love of handwritten letterforms to the screen with the PR Uncial font, a playful introduction to the art of calligraphic forms.

Time was when letterforms came about from hand and nib not click and pixel. Beginning around 200 AD, a particular style known as Uncial was the go-to choice of scribes writing out Latin and Greek texts. Uncial relies on simple, rounded strokes from a pen held in one position.

Some font designers are constantly in motion. Jennifer Dickert, designer of the modern serif font Sanford, is a case in point, deftly stepping past a lineup of elaborate handwritten fonts to produce a serif made for minimalists.

The New Hampshire-based designer started her font stable with quirky characters inspired by the typography on albums recorded by the New Wave band The Cure. At the time she was a graphic design student in Boston learning the ropes on Macromedia's Fontographer, the very application that jump-started the modern era of typographic experimentation.

Deep in the heart of every type designer is a cartographer who labors to plot the perfect path from A to Z even as they explore the mysterious regions in between. After all, without diligent attention to detail, a reader's eye could travel up the cap A, turn right too early and end up thinking it was on a lowercase n (as in the beginning of nowhere). Josh Fitzgerald's font design Pushpins (free) makes this mapping of type look like child's play.

Pushpins comes alive using layers and effects in a program like Adobe Photoshop. True to its name, Pushpins' initial design started with the plotting of straight lines joined by small dots that approximate pinholes. Instead of drawing from point to point, these digital forms were constructed using stacks of pixel bricks in FontStruct, the free online font design application created by Rob Meek and responsible for experimental font sets like Jett and Tangle.

When you see the word embroidery do you think kitschy kittens on potholders in grandmother's kitchen? Stop right there. NCD Embroidery Comp Size, a free font by London designer N Downey, is far from domestic. This display font is a rule-bending pixel construction with a touch of military style.

What's the story? One day a graphic designer decides to reproduce an 18th century military jacket using his girlfriend's sewing machine to mimic historical embroidery. His project leads him to explore zigzag stitching formats even as he spots an announcement for the FontStruct Handmade Competition. Many hours of pixel manipulation later, Downey sends in his entry-a home-sewn style complete with punctuation!

When your kingdom is engaged in a game of thrones, image is everything. A ruler busy at the barricades might carelessly command the art department to get setting with the first available blackletter or even a neutral sans serif, but a cleverer solution can be found in Yataghan (free), Daniel Midgley's Gothic display font.

Yataghan’s styling crosses from battlefield to screen, bringing with it a period feel.By day, Daniel Midgley is a lecturer at the University of Western Australia. He's a linguist, so it comes as no surprise that Yataghan gets an edge from its name. In the world of weaponry, a yataghan is a type of Turkish saber used from the mid-16th to late 19th centuries. The French infantry adapted the yataghan form for their bayonets in the 1840s with good reason. Picture a sword whose hilt ends in a nob like a python's head. Size that nob to fit nicely in the palm of your hand. Attach a single-edged blade and have that blade flow out and up like a shiny, steel tongue. That should more than do the job, but then take that lethal form and apply it to a snake-like character and there, type design fans, is where Yataghan the font begins.

Here's a tale of two cities. She's a Philadelphia-born rocker known for driving beats and in-your-face lyrics. He's a Parisian design student with a guitar hero alter-ego and a handful of pixel bricks. What bad grrrl guitarist Joan Jett and apprentice typographer Izzy-sparks have in common is a heart made for rock and an homage font as black and distressed as the lead singer's wardrobe. Jett (free) is a display font with attitude to spare.

Jett's B and V rotate and combine to create a black heart, but that's not the only trick this font can do. Jett was created as part of a class assignment to capture the essence of a favorite artist using Rob Meek's online application FontStruct. The work began as a clone of another FontStruction. Designers in the FontStruct community encourage cloning (copying a font set) by choosing a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. This was the case with Formal Roman, a FontStruction inspired by, (but not a direct copy of) Minion Pro, an Adobe font designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990.

Within M.C. Escher's illustrative prints, people and things defy the logic of the natural world in a disturbing, matter-of-fact way. Sounds just like the twisted scenario of a Christopher Nolan film, but could the same illusion work for a font? The answer to that question can be found in Hommage à Escher (free), Tibor Lantos's marvel of typographic joinery. From its inception, this display font was made for illusion.

The playful constructions of Hommage à Escher take on added dimension with a custom built background such as the one seen behind the asterisk here. Lantos constructed his salute to Mr. Escher using FontStruct, the online application by Rob Meek that deploys collections of pixels (aka bricks) to construct forms on a grid. There are no Bezier curves in the application, but that hasn't stopped the Hungarian typographer from turning his font's two-dimensional characters into sculpture. Lantos is no stranger to FontStruction with more than 83 creations to his credit including Rivendell, a full set of woven capitals mimicking Celtic knotwork. Hommage à Escher is an update from an earlier attempt by the designer. In his latest version, cleverly shaded, two-sided horizontal and vertical posts interlock to create a 3D effect that twists the alphabet and fools the eye.

Gritty and sensational, the pulp detective magazines of the mid-Twentieth century were more tabloid than the tabloids of today. Who needs to read about starlets gone wild and rehab gone south when crimes like the "Passion Slaying of the Bar-fly Brunette" can be read for the flip of a dime? What font could possibly do justice to the wasp-waisted victim cowering on the cover? Walter Velez's True Crimes (free) is made for the job.

Deathly pale text and saturated backgrounds are a match for the True Crimes font.Mr. Velez is an accomplished illustrator based in New York. He knows how to wield a brush and it appears he's no stranger to the lettering style that graced both pulp magazine covers like True Crime Cases and the film title screens for Mildred Pierce, Born to Kill, and Touch of Evil. Velez has masterfully captured the urgent, shocked voice of the pulps right down to the ragged stroke ends that hint at a rush to finish before the presses run the morning edition.