Thus the "Table of Contents" icon over at right has been updated. Here's a larger version, making use of Comicraft's "Stand by 4 Action" (a mainstay of their AVENGERS and THUNDERBOLTS books circa 1996 - 2000ish) and "Monster Mash":
I've also created new headers for some of the pages which previously lacked them, specifically COLLECTED EDITIONS, EDITORIALS & MISCELLANEA, and X-MEN COLLECTIONS:
The third of these utilizes both the X-Men logo I recreated a while back, as well as Comicraft's "To Be Continued" font, which, again, was very heavily used on X-book covers twenty or so years ago. (Seriously, it's hard to go even a month in the late nineties without seeing this font on at least one cover from that line!) The rest of the fonts used in these headers are freebies from various spots around the web, including Blambot.
Lastly, most of my pages dedicates to reviews of various series have their own logos, borrowed whenever possible from those series -- but my COMIC STRIP REVIEWS and MANGA REVIEWS (which combines separate pages that previously existed for GUNDAM: THE ORIGIN and GUNSMITH CATS, plus THE BIG O, which somehow never got a page after last year's reviews) forego individual series logos, so they also get spiffy new headers, again using freebies from Blambot, plus the one pay font I purchased from them a while back, "Might Makes Right":
Why do I do this? Well, obviously to make the place look nice. It's sort of become an outlet for me. I've long had an interest in graphic design, and while it's nowhere near my chosen profession, it is a pretty major hobby, dating back to the days I've mentioned several times before, when I ran a MARVEL SUPER HEROES roleplaying game in middle school, high school, and college. I would often try to create "issue covers" for the various adventures in which my players engaged, and part of that was coming up with (hand-drawn) versions of the various Marvel mastheads of the time.
Nowadays I still like to do that sort of thing, even if I don't really have any reason for it -- and while I never had any desktop publishing type software -- way too expensive for a hobby -- the advent of the iPad and relatively inexpensive apps that do a lot of the same stuff have made this kind of thing way more fun and accessible to me than it ever was before.
So here we are. Hopefully all this stuff looks as nice to readers as it does to me, but as always, I welcome feedback and opinions on the designs.
Forgive my ignorance here, but ones does one get when "buying" a font? Is it, like, a bit of code that allows you to change text to use the purchased font (like some kind of HTML alteration), or an extension that gets added to any program with font-selection (like Word, Blogger,etc.)? I like the idea of buying access to some of these fonts, but have no idea how that even works.
ReplyDeletePS - the site looks pretty great with the new fonts!
Thank you!
DeleteWhen purchasing a font, you receive a file to download, which you can then install on whatever device(s) you choose. I assume PCs are the most common way to do this, and both Mac and PC let you install a font by right-clicking on the file -- but I paid like $5.00 for an iOS app that lets you install fonts on your iPad/iPhone, too.
Buying the font, at least from Comicraft and Blambot, gives the end-user the ability to use it in nearly any way they please, in perpetuity. Once you own it, you can use it in comic books, advertisements, logos, whatever, -- but only if the output is done in a way that other people can't actively use it/copy it/etc. What that means is that image files are fine, but you can't circulate a licensed font in a PDF where the text can be highlighted or there are fillable forms, or in an ebook or stuff like that. There are licenses available for those uses too, but they cost way more than the basic license.
So everything above is done on my iPad in an app called Graphic, where I can type the letters and manipulate them myself, but after that I save everything as PNG or JPEG files so that readers of the blog can only look but not touch, so to speak.
I find that Blambot fonts are very reasonably priced, but Comicraft's are extremely expensive. However Comicraft has had two 50% off sales so far this year (one on right now), and apparently they run a New Year's Day sale every year where every single font on their site, even the ones that usually run in triple digit prices, cost only the amount of the year with a decimal point in the middle (i.e. last New Year's, all their fonts were $20.18 each and next time they'll be $20.19 each). So I've bought a some of these fonts via the 50% sales when that discount would drop the price below or to $20, and I'm waiting for New Year's Day for a few of the more expensive ones.