As anyone who reads this blog may know, our love for typography runs deep. We have been featuring lettering artists for years and years now and are devoted to supporting these artists and helping them flourish. So it is with great excitement (understatement) that we announce our soon to launch font foundry! Originally, we started this project (3 years ago now!), because there was a need in the marketplace for beautiful hand-lettered fonts, Magpie Paper Works was the only one at the time really fulfilling this need. Magpie’s foundry is still in my estimation the creme de la creme of fonts and I have never tired of Jess McCarty’s hand. We decided along with Jess to take on a most ambitious project, a project that feels like it has taken on epic proportions, we have come together to create the most authentic looking, most advanced, highest quality hand-lettered fonts in the industry and have tapped only the very best lettering artists (both the famed and up & coming) to develop their signature hands into fonts of the highest caliber available. These are not just fonts, but for a designer, your secret weapons. These fonts are head and shoulders above the rest and I do not say this lightly, we have spent untold hours in development, testing, perfecting and creating something that looks so beautifully handcrafted that you would be hard-pressed to find anything else of this quality on the market. We have come together to bring you the Rare Bird Font Foundry–luxury fonts for discerning designers.Read More
Category: Good to Know
Font and Florals!
Well, hello friends! We have a winner for Bonnie Christine’s Roost Tribe membership and it is (insert drumroll)– Beth | Fatesallow! We are so happy so many of you entered, it really is an incredible value (both Michelle and I are members). Bonnie is one of the nicest, most motivated and inspiring individuals and we know that the ‘Tribe’ is the perfect place to jump start your surface pattern design career! Congrats!
On another note, we haven’t done an ‘Around here…’ post in a while, but we have been up to so much and are learning so much that we thought we would share some of our inspiration and findings. Tomorrow Michelle and I have our first fashion photo shoot! This is a huge deal, we have done a ton of product photography (even created a product photography editing software), but we don’t have a lot of model work in our portfolio and we are thrilled to be able to add this to it! The client is special as we have been able to work with their branding on a whole other level.Read More
Digitize your lettering + illustrations!
I love when things come full circle, don’t you? What seems like a lifetime ago I had an itch to try my hand at calligraphy, something more modern/contemporary. Only a handful of artists were out there and I actually had the nerve to contact Betsy Dunlap to ask if she would teach me (she didn’t do that sort of thing). You see at the time there was NO where to learn how to do this. I didn’t know what supplies to buy, I didn’t no where to start, there were no tutorials, there were no classes, it was so frustrating. Read More
White home printers
We moved almost six months ago and with that moved we downsized considerably, which meant I lost my ‘Cloffice’ (my office in a closet). It was a fairly large closet and I had an ancient, but fully functioning laser printer workhorse. I knew that when I set-up my new work space it would need to be out in the open in a shared space so I didn’t want a giant eyesore of a printer (with no wifi capability so it couldn’t be tucked away somewhere more inconspicuous). I didn’t need anything fancy as I don’t do any professional printing at home anymore, but the convenience of having a printer? I can’t believe I went 6 long months without one! My desk/office area is all white both because I love white but also because it seems to feel like it blends and disappears more and doesn’t shout ‘hey I have an office in my living room’, I was on the futile hunt for a simple white printer and let me tell you it was no easy feat to locate. I thought maybe others might be looking for one as well and so I did a quick roundup of some. There is nothing fancy about these printers (although most have wifi and print from tablet or mobile, and they are all under $100), the one I bought was $50USD, the ink replacement is about the same price! I hope you found this useful, links below to the printers featured and our current fave printer paper.
//RESOURCES//
Michelle’s fave printer paper (it’s so nice)
Tristan B. is the co-creator of the world’s best + easiest product photography editing tool-Foto Rx | Shopkeeper’s Helper and one of the writer’s of this delightful blog.
Easily restore vintage photos with Vintage Foto Fix Coming Soon!
We have been on overdrive with our workload these last couple of months, lucky for us we love what we do! We have many exciting things coming–a photo shoot for a branding client, a much loved project that we did, we loved it so much I told Michelle I wished it was our branding! Super excited that we get to shoot/style/edit for her, I love cohesive branding. We have a top secret project that we have been working on for years now coming to a launch soon, you don’t even know how happy I will be when we can set that birdie free! And we are launching a Vintage Foto Fix set for Foto Rx in April! I don’t know about you, but being able to quickly clean up (and save) many cherished memories is one of the best feelings ever. It has also forced me to do some much needed scanning and digital archiving, because prior I only had originals and those can so easily be lost or destroyed. We are popping in today to see if anyone would like to provide us with hi-res scans of vintage family photos to potentially use for our before + afters, if we choose to use it we will edit and send you a copy of the edited image! You can upload images to our shop by hitting contact here .
We are super excited and hope you take us up on our offer and send in those scanned photos!
//RESOURCES//
Vintage Foto Fix | One Click Photo Repair Coming Soon!
Lettering Cleaned + Digitized with Lettering Rx
Adobe Photoshop monthly subscription
Tristan B. is the co-creator of the world’s best + easiest product photography editing tool-Foto Rx | Shopkeeper’s Helper and one of the writer’s of this delightful blog.