As I mentioned in the tutorial on creating a retro sci-fi poster in Photoshop, when you’re creating retro-themed artwork,  choosing the right font is critical. If you want to evoke the old pulp sci-fi novels or WPA posters, you’ll need fonts that have the right mix of authenticity, imperfection and character to sell the illusion of time and place. Whenever I work in this style, I spend a great deal of time browsing through my font collections to find just the right font for the mood I’m trying to create. Over the years, I’ve found a core group of go-to fonts that I return to again and again. Here’s a small sample of my favorites, with titles generated by the Cornelius Zappencackler’s Derange-O-Lab Pulp Sci Fi Title-O-Tron!

1. Bebas

FREE at DaFont.com. This is one of my favorites. I’ve used it in the Battlestar Galactica propaganda posters, the Serenity Blue Sun travel posters (both volumes 1 and 2), the Sci Fi Science project and more.

2. Berlin Sans FB Demi

This one actually comes bundled with Microsoft Office programs, but I like the bulky, uneven-ness of it.

3. CCBattleCry

A sound effects font from ComicBookFonts.com. (Check these guys out for a TON of great fonts) It’s great for more light-hearted, whimsical uses. I used it in the Gender & Genre poster I created for the California Browncoats to list the date information.

4. CCMonsterMash

A sound effects font from ComicBookFonts.com. Another one of my favorites. This one screams “they came from above!” This was the headline font for the Gender & Genre poster, as well as the Giant Fire Breathing Robot URL in the retro sci-fi poster tutorial.

5. CCSpeedingBullet

A display font from ComicBookFonts.com. This was the title font for the main Sci Fi Science book cover.

6. East Market

Another great FREE font available at DaFont.com

7. Electro Gothic

From the HP Lovecraft Historical Society vintage font collection. I use a huge number of the fonts from this collection in my work. I’ve only started using this one recently, though, and not yet in anything that’s been published. Stay tuned, though!

8. Headline Modified

Another font from the HP Lovecraft Historical Society vintage font collection. You can see this one in the “Do Your Part For Humanity” Battlestar propaganda poster.

9. Mercantile Card

Mercantile Card is also a great font for creating ephemera, like antique shipping labels. It’s another HP Lovecraft Historical Society font.

10. Newsflash BB

A nice, heavy, FREE font from Blambot.com

It’s a Start …

These are just a few of my favorite fonts. If you’re going to create a lot of pieces in this style, you’ll need to build up a large collection of fonts so that you don’t wind up repeating yourself too often. Check out these font sites to start your search:

• DaFont.com
• Blambot.com
• HP Lovecraft Historical Society vintage font collection
• ComicBookFonts.com
• FLAT-IT Type Foundry (I actually discovered these guys while researching this post. They created the Bebas font, but their site has a cornucopia of great retro-style fonts that I can’t wait to dive into)

No new clients this week, and a couple of promising leads have been put on hold. While I’m a little disappointed, it means I can work this week on getting myself better organized.

This evening, I’ll finish and upload the blog post I promised on retro fonts, and then I’ll start one on digital organization for designers. It’s a topic I’ve struggled with myself; hopefully you can learn a thing or two from my (many) trials and errors.

Since I’ve got less on my plate this week, I’ll also be working on my resume and my e-mail pitch to prospective clients. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about subscribing to production reports to see what movies and tv shows are currently in production. I’ve found a new source called Below The Line, which is significantly cheaper than the two I mentioned previously. I’ve still got a while to go before I move to L.A., which means I can’t be quite as gung-ho about job hunting yet. So this less-expensive alternative is a great fit for me right now. I’m going to keep an eye out for productions that will be filming in San Francisco, and try to send out at least one resume a week, just to test the water. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Make-It-Worth-Your-While Link

While I hope my Monday updates are interesting (and with any luck, inspirational), I also want to offer at least one thing that’s tangibly useful. So check out this interview with Go Media’s Jeff Finley on designing for the film industry. If you could dog-ear a web page, I would have worn the corner off of this page long ago. I’ve read it countless times, and it’s a great source of inspiration and advice.

Designing for the Film Industry: A Chat with Go Media’s Jeff Finley [from Colorburned]

I’m working on a longer post on great sources for retro / vintage fonts that I hope to have done by this weekend, but in the meantime, I wanted to share this quick post on attention to detail.

I’m a big believer in the idea that it’s the little things — more so than the big ones — that truly help sell a design. A tiny drop shadow here, a subtle highlight there can be enough to turn a “good enough” design into a bona fide portfolio piece.

Take for instance this image of the History of Search Engines from one of my favorite infographic designers, Paul Horn, aka Doc Splatter on Twitter.

The layout and presentation of information is professional and compelling, as his pieces usually are. But what caught my eye and inspired me to write this post was the scroll bar along the right side of the image. As it follows the timeline down from 1990 to the present day, the scroll bar gradually changes from a Mac OS 9 interface style to a modern OS X style, reflecting the changing times.

There are other similar touches, like the archaic beveling on the labels which gradually shift to a more modern aesthetic to a shifting color palette that echoes corresponding shift in web design trends over the last 20 years.

The designer could have gone without any of those added elements, and it still would have been a well-designed piece. But by pushing past “good enough,” he created a piece that really resonates with the viewer.

Hmm, let’s see … Not a whole lot going on this week. Just the usual top-secret work for QMx, a couple of freelance projects … oh, and a Photoshop tutorial that got linked to from i09 and Gizmodo (to name just a few) and is currently flooding my blog with new visitors.

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If you read my recent tutorial on creating pulp sci-fi art in Photoshop, you’ll remember that I mentioned that adding “flavor” text, like the price and titles of featured stories, is a great way to breathe life into the magazine cover. I just discovered a great resource for flavor text at a site called “Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.”

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