New Font Release: Dark Angel

Alphabet Soup Type Founders and Michael Doret are proud to announce the Release of Dark Angel, a “blackletter/hybrid” font. Dark Angel is the first completely new take in decades on the traditional “blackletter” font style. This font had its genesis years ago when the style was born in a sktech Michael created of a new logo for the California Angels baseball team (renamed shortly thereafter the Anaheim Angels). That Angels logo was never completed, but its rough sketch rose from the dead and become the basis for this brand new font design—and was also the source for the name. Below you can compare the forms from that original logo pencil and the corresponding letters from the new font. Many accomodations had to be made to keep these forms working together as a font but, as much as possible, the spirit of that original character design has been kept. It’s kind of blackletter in feel, but as a display font it’s so much more. It is far more legible than most “Old English” or “Gothic Script” styles, and incorporates many features never before seen in them, such as swashes, tails and a plethora of ligatures. Type purists may be critical of the lack of adherence to traditional forms, but this font should be seen only as “in the spirit of” blackletter, and attempting to create something that hasn’t been seen or done before—something that feels traditional, yet at the same time fresh and unexpected. Dark Angel can be purchased in its regular solid form, or as Dark Angel Underlight—a “handtooled” font. When these two fonts are purchased together as a Family package, included will be a third font—Dark Angel Highlight. With this font layered over the basic font, two–color typesetting will be created when the highlight and the base font are assigned two different colors. With Stylistic Alternates you can go either “Plain” or “Fancy”, changing the look of your copy to suit your needs. Compare the two samples below. Some characters have multiple alternates. And furthermore… Utilizing Dark Angel’s various features, words can be put together to build creative configurations, wordmarks and “Logos”. The free-standing underlines you see in some of the examples shown here were set independantly and then manually moved into position. Dark Angel has enough language support to make the builders of Babel envious—its 1,163 glyphs can be used to set copy in 59 different languages. From A to Z: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bemba, Bosnian, Catalan, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Ganda, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kalaallisut, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Lithuanian, Luo, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romansh, Sango, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Turkish, Welsh, and last (but not least) Zulu. –For more detailed information download The Dark Angel Manual PDF (1.1 MB). –Dark Angel on FontBros –Dark Angel on MyFonts –Dark Angel on FontShop –Dark Angel on YouWorkForThem –Coincidental to the release of Dark Angel on MyFonts, Alphabet Soup is running a Special Promotion: 25% off this font for a limited time. –Dark Angel Design and Art: Michael Doret/Alphabet Soup Type Founders –Dark Angel OpenType Programming:Patrick Griffin/CanadaType

Writing Dracula: An Anniversary Edition

Back in 2009 I designed graphics for a pen and business card set for a company named Acme Studios based in Hawaii. I called the design “QWERTY” because I based it on old typewriter keys and the QWERTY keyboard (still in use today on everyone’s computers and phones).

Last year Acme contacted me to see if I’d be interested in designing a logo for “Dracula”. This wasn’t to be Dracula the Movie, or even Dracula the TV show—it was to be for Dracula the Pen. Acme had been contacted by the estate of Bram Stoker to create a limited edition pen set to commemorate in 2012 the 100th anniversary of the death of the author/creator of Dracula, and unacknowledged father of the present day Vampire Empire. It was one of the few times Acme had gone to an outside designer with an assignment—most of the pens created for Acme (like QWERTY) are designer generated ideas. This Dracula logo would be used on the pen itself, and all the packaging—which was to be quite elaborate.

With some projects I start out by creating many small rough pencil sketches to try to discover how I want to solve a problem. Somehow with this project I knew from the start what I wanted to do. In my head I had eliminated all the hackneyed and clichéd solutions that one would come to expect for such a logo. I decided that I wanted to start out with a sort of black-letter, gothic form as a base, and then transform it into something that would communicate what I thought of as a sort of “decayed elegance”. So I just started drawing:

For some reason I stopped before completing the word (guess I knew what another “a” would look like). But I liked a lot of what I was seeing and expanded it into my next rough. This one was a lot more fluid, and I really liked where it was going:

What had started out with gothic, black-letter forms, was turning into something else—but I wasn't sure how to define it:

Then, using that pencil rough as a base, I started inking over it on an overlay to start to work out and refine the weights and forms:

After scanning the inked version, I placed it in Adobe Illustrator as a template, and started creating the final art. As you can see, I ended up deviating from my inking in several places:

Finally, I was pleased with what I had done . . . I felt it had that feeling of “decayed elegance” that I had been striving for. I rendered it in blood-red against a black background then presented the final art to Acme, who in turn presented it to the Stoker estate. It was approved without a hitch:

Acme will be releasing this pen set this year in time for Halloween. It will be in a limited edition of 999 fountain pens with blood-red ink and an interchangeable rollerball option. The pen will lay within a coffin shaped box together with a bottle of blood-red ink, and a red rollerball refill:

And the entire set is encased in what appears to be a bound edition of Dracula:

The set will retail for $500 and will be availabe through ACME Studio retailers.

COMMENTS WELCOME!