I’ve discovered that drawing a new font from scratch is a lot like pushing a big rock uphill. Meanwhile I troll around the Internet looking for inspiration. Here are a few of the places I have been recently.

I will start with the website of a guy called Kevin King. I’d previously found a couple of his fonts on free font servers and had to chase up more. From his website you can download 30 of the fonts that he has designed and freely makes available. He is also a good illustrator, so check out his drawings too.

Kingsthings are special fonts for special occasions but if you are anything like me, you’ll find a reason to use them. I particularly love Kingsthings Gothique and Kingsthings Spike.

Fromoldbooks.org is a very strange little site. The owner Liam collects old books on subjects that interest him and he thought it was a shame that only he could see them, so he started putting scans and transcriptions from them on line.

Scanned pictures from a range of books that feature ruined castles, antiquities, ornamental typography and much, much more.

From here we move on to an Australian calligraphy site owned and maintained by Cecilia Sharpley.

Another Australian site worth a visit; Artserv at the Australian National University

“The site, containing some 450,000 images (nearly 550Gb of storage) is dedicated to visual material useful for teaching and learning Art History and adjacent areas.” A haphazard collection at best which as the author Michael Greenhalgh states “Like Topsy, the site just growed.”

A taste of what is to be found here under Late Antique & Mediaeval Manuscripts
The beginning of Gospel of St John from the Gospels of S Willibrord c690.

Then I found this 9th century Breton version of the same page at Collect Britain. The British Library’s collection is one of the finest in the world. More than 2,000 images have been selected here from manuscripts associated with particular places or regions across the British Isles. They reflect almost a thousand years of history, from around 600 to 1600.

Moving on to Dscriptorium, devoted to collecting, storing and distributing digital images of Medieval manuscripts and from the University of Kentucky Special Collections comes this detail of MS. Ital.Ky.I - fols. 25v. The pictures in this collection were scanned from slides taken by Dr. Christine Havice, so they are less than sharp. I love the filigree that extends almost the length of the entire page.

The final site for this week contains pictures and other resources from the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.

THE CAMELOT PROJECT is designed to make available in electronic format a database of Arthurian texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information. The project, begun in 1995, is sponsored by the University of Rochester and prepared in The Robbins Library, a branch of Rush Rhees Library.

Similarly they host the Robin Hood Project, at the University of Rochester

More next time
Logging off.
Jools