WhatTheFont for iPhone takes font identification on the road
I have a bit of a sickness when it comes to fonts: if I see one I like that I’ve never seen before, I have to identify it and, often times, buy it. I can’t control it. Sometimes the obsession prevents me from enjoying my favorite shows.
Well, thanks to MyFonts.com, I can now employ my iPhone to further my habit. Their new iPhone app, WhatTheFont for iPhone, allows me to take a picture of the font in question with the iPhone’s built-in camera. After cropping the image to just the part I want identified, the software uploads the sample to MyFonts.com where it is analyzed. It asks me to verify and identify the letters shown in the sample I photographed. Then it comes back several suggestions as to what font I was looking for. It’s like a magic trick for font maniacs: pick a font, any font…
WhatTheFont for iPhone is free to download from the iTunes App Store.
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Dragon Bones– Blambot’s FREE font for February
I can’t believe it’s February 2009 already.
It’s a new month and that means a new FREE font from Blambot. For February 2009, it’s Dragon Bones.
Says fontmaster, Nate Piekos, With regular, italic and bold included, Dragonbones is perfect as the voice for your ancient wyrm or snivelling goblin. On an interesting side note, I challeneged myself to create a font from start to finish in 24 hours. Dragonbones is it! Of course it helped that I needed a font like this for the voice of Frog Thor in a new Marvel book. Necessity is the mother of invention!
Download and enjoy this now font. Also check out Balmbot’s Comics Grammar & Tradition. Great article.
Please read and adhere to Blambot’s License Agreement for Free Fonts
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Blambot’s FREE font for December is Marooned on Mars
If memory serves (and with each passing year, it serves a bit less accurately) Blambot usually offers a festive FREE font during the month of December. This year, the free font isn’t all that Christmassy but does hava classic comic lettering style: Marooned on Mars.
Nate Piekos, the font’s creator, describes it as a classic, sci-fi, brush-style font to “trumpet the arrival of your new alien overlords!” It’s beauteous.
Note:I don’t mention this as often as I should, but Blambot’s free fonts are free for not-for-profit use and for independent comics. Read the free fonts license agreement for details.
Crash Course, Blambot’s free font for November
This month, the free font offering over at Blambot is one of those awesome looking “sound effects” fonts that make comic books so exciting to read–Crash Course.
The font’s creator, Nate Piekos describes Crash Course:
CRASHCOURSE BB is a tall, chunky sound effects font that’s been smashed to bits. It’s cracked and splintered for BIG sound effects.
it sounds like it’s clobbering time! Crash Course comes in Regular and Italic and the upper and lowercase characters have varied crack patterns.
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Extensis announces Suitcase Fusion 2 for Leopard
Extensis today released Suitcase Fusion 2, its next generation single-user font management utility. Suitcase Fusion 2 has a completely redesigned user interface and code base built on the stable platform used for the Extensis Universal Type Client.
By using Suitcase Fusion 2′s new Glyph View Palette you can now easily preview and navigate through potentially thousands of glyphs within a single typeface, compare and select the best font for your project. The new Floating Preview feature allows you to drag-and-drop type previews directly onto a layout for comparison.
Auto-activation plug-ins available with Suitcase Fusion 2 include Adobe InDesign CS4, Adobe Illustrator CS4 and QuarkXPress 8, as well Adobe Creative Suite 3 apps and QuarkXPress 7. Auto-activation operates in the background and give you the ability to work in supported applications while automatically activating the exact fonts using Extensis’ Font Sense font matching feature. Font Sense creates a unique ID for each font–like font fingerprinting–to ensure font consistency as documents move from design through production.
English, French, and German versions of Suitcase Fusion 2 are now available for USD$99.95 for the full product license and USD$49.98 for upgrades from Suitcase X1 or newer. Suitcase Fusion 2 will support Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard); Power PC G5, Intel or faster processor; 256 MB RAM; 50 MB Hard Drive space + space for fonts; Safari 2.0 or Firefox 2.0 or higher.
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Elder Gods is Blambots Free font for October
I bet it’s hard for Blambot fontmaster, Nate Piekos, to decide how to best exemplify the Halloweenness of the month of October with a free font when he does so many fantastic and sometimes horrific fonts all year ’round.
This October, Nate has created a font he calls Elder Gods and this is how he announces it to the world.
Got your stuff packed? Clean underwear? Good, because the Elder Gods have awakened from their subterranean slumber, and you’re their new servant…FOREVER! Upper and lowercase font with a staggered baseline and it comes with Regular and Italic!
Since fonts are like little programs on your machine, you should be pretty selective of who you chose to download fonts from–especially free fonts. I have no problem recommending Blambot fonts and I hope you will give the pro fonts (the ones you have to pay for) a try as well.
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Nate Piekos updates his classic Digital Strip font. It’s free as always.
Blambot’s free for for August is a remastered classic: Nate Piekos’ Digital Strip 2. The new version has been re-hand-lettered for a more organic look and better readability. The original Digital Strip font is still available also. Both are available in Regular, Italic and Bold and both are absolutely free.
I love to recommend Blambot fonts. A lot of care and skill goes into making each one and if you read any online comics, I’m sure you’ve seen a few Blambot fonts. Be sure to check out their full catalog; both free and their inexpensive pay fonts.
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Blambots FREE font for July goes crazy with the autoligatures
Blambot’s FREE font for July 2008 is called Sanitarium. It’s got sharp, irregular serifs and varied letter heights to give it a manic, unstable look. Designed as a perfect logo and title font, the OpenType version is equipped with autoligatures to give your type a random element and so that no two consecutive letters look the same.
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Blambot offers FREE Shock Therapy to font addicts
Rather that offering help for those weak to the siren song of free fonts, Blambot is in fact taking advantage of this addiction on a monthly basis. This month, their free font is and electrically charged creation entitled Shock Therapy. It has sharp, lightning-bolt edges and comes with upper and lowercase characters. Available in TrueType, Postscript1 and OpenType, Shock Therapy comes in Regular and Italic.
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Initiate Blambot’s FREE font for May 2008…Autodestruct!!
Nate Piekos of Blambot his posted his FREE Font and Pro Font for May 2008. Blambot offers a wealth of awesome well made fonts. It’s one of the few places where you download any of the free fonts and not put your machine in jeopardy. And, in fact, you will more likely make your Mac cooler.
This month’s free font, Autodestruct, was deisgned to be the perfect dialogue font for comics with speaking computers or androids but it could just as easily and appropriately be used for logos or titles! It comes with regular and bold in a myriad of font formats.
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