Is this a font?

Vasil Stanev
Vasil Stanev Posts: 775
in Technique and Theory
Has anyone seen this cheery fellows been made into a working font or at least a full Basic Latin alphabet?

Comments

  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Looks like an engraving to me.
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 674
    I don’t know about this example but I saw several type samples that showed similar alphabets as type. I don't have one at hand, right now.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Looks like too much detail in the shading to be type.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,440
    Kind of feels like type to me and I feel like I've seen similar--but the fact that the A's and E's are different from each other is more evidence that would suggest it's not type.
  • George Thomas
    George Thomas Posts: 647
    Aside from Craig's comments about the differing letters, this is so unusual that it can only be an engraving intended for one specific purpose. The fact that it is being used for "Danse Macabre" only reinforces that (death and skeletons).

    What would be the market for such a design otherwise? The image provided by Vasil is a title page from the book.
  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 775
    edited December 2016
    I don't know how the market is for such letterbats, they are very specific, but there are some out there. This for example is from Linotype:


    (obviously it's very different)
    Personally I find them delightful and when the Dance appeared in a nice translation here I thought about a Cyrillic, purely as a challenge.

    Besides, if these skeletons were to be traced, even by hand, wouldn't the font become too heavy as a file to be practically usable? The Victorian above is just silhouette.
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,998
    Vasil Stanev said:
    Besides, if these skeletons were to be traced, even by hand, wouldn't the font become too heavy as a file to be practically usable? The Victorian above is just silhouette.
    The FDK would choke on compiling something with that much detail. I’ve had people try to hire me to do production on distressed fonts that aren’t this complex and that stuff never compiles. 
  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 775
    Yes, I thought so. Maybe in the future... :smile:
  • Arthur Reinders Folmer
    Arthur Reinders Folmer Posts: 38
    Even though there are tech limitations, you can do workarounds. Optical illusion can be a good method to reduce the amount of nodes while not downscaling on the level of detail. I think these types could be converted to a font, but with some hassle.

    You'll have to lose part of the shading and work at quite a decent upm at the very least. It also depends on the size of your character set, but I'm currently working on a font with about 350 characters with the largest having about 7k nodes & handles, and a the rest having at the very least 1k. It compiles perfectly and installation doesn't take long.

    So don't be scared of seemingly impossible fonts! You can always take some steps back in detail when it's it's too heavy, but adding detail is much more of a hassle.
  • Paul Davy
    Paul Davy Posts: 3
    Found a copy here if anyone fancies it:
    http://www.edition-originale.com/fr/litterature/livres-illustres/anonyme-la-grande-danse-macabre-des-hommes-et-1862-52494

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