It’s Valentines Day. And on the off chance that means you’re getting married soon, we here at FontShop congratulate you and hope it’s of some service our putting together a list of recommended faces for your invitations.
It is clearly important that Americans misspell the word honor.
These two both interest me because of their departure from more established formal calligraphic styles in pursuit of practical 19th century penmanship.
On getting just the right typographic feel, the work of the typographer of course extends well beyond the type selection process. If you’re a young designer, let me suggest just a few things to keep in mind starting out:
Choose an appropriate and flattering medium. Try a few different sizes of paper dummy. Package each as they’ll travel in the mail, and post them to yourself. This confronts the cost of postage from the outset. If environmental impact is chief among your concerns, consider dispensing with the interior envelope, or going with electronic only invitations.
Think about different processes and design to process. If printing letterpress from photopolymer plates for example, have someone familiar with the strengths and limitations of the process help you. Other common processes include engraving, foil stamping, thermography, letterpress printing from moveable type, lithography, and digital. If your printer quotes you a digital option, make sure you know what he or she means (usually sheetfed inkjet, but lately the term has also come to mean monochromatic or color laser).
Establish harmonious proportions. The invitation should feel good to the hand and its message clear to the eye. The size of the type, as well as the size of the margins should relate to the media that carries it. If designing in multiple sizes or styles, adhere your text to a sufficiently coarse baseline grid.
Don’t ‘brand’ this. Make it beautiful, and avoid the temptation of applying logotypes or monograms to everything. Carefully controlled, understated typography is one of the best ways of developing a consistent voice.
Do what you like. One of the things that makes a good typographer invaluable to her or his client is the ability to be arbitrary when necessary. Don’t care for this J? Try an I instead.
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