The personal disquiet of

Mark Boulton

November 2nd, 2009

New Drop Caps

When I redesigned this blog a little while ago, the drop caps I used were always going to be a place­holder. Fol­low­ing an even­ing with my Sister-in-law–who hap­pens to be a tex­tile designer/illustrator by training–I com­mis­sioned her to pro­duce a com­plete upper­case alpha­bet based on Geor­gia. I’m thrilled that two months later, they’re live on the site. (if you’re read­ing this on RSS, then pop on to the web to see what you’re missing).

The brief was pretty simple. I wanted illus­trat­ive drop caps pro­duced that were aligned to the inspir­a­tion for this design; namely Renais­sance illus­tra­tions and carvings. They ended up being slightly broader in inspir­a­tion than that though. They’re hand painted on thick, tex­tured cart­ridge paper in black ink.

I planned on inter­view­ing Helen (and I still plan on doing that), but I just couldn’t sit on my hands until then. Here’s a few let­ters that are par­tic­u­lar favour­ites of mine. Inter­view com­ing soon…

Drop cap G

Drop cap S

Drop cap h

Drop cap o

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 am and is filed under Design, Personal, Typography.

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58 Responses to “New Drop Caps”

  1. Alun said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:35 am

    Lovely work.

    I think you need to change the image order to GSOH though :)

  2. Tim Van Damme said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:36 am

    I think I just lost my jaw. Stunning!

  3. Jack Osborne said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:37 am

    These are abso­lutely stunning.

  4. MrQwest said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:39 am

    These are amaz­ing! Your sister-in-law is rather talented!

  5. prisca said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:39 am

    Mark,
    how abso­lutely stun­ning ;) beau­ti­ful work and what a lovely gem to add to your gor­geous site :)

  6. Owen said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:40 am

    Those are lovely. And unique to this site. Will you be using them elsewhere?

  7. Sulcalibur said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:42 am

    They look stun­ning, they really do, although at times they do seem a little ‘busy’.

  8. Mark said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:42 am

    @owen: No, they’ll be stay­ing here. The copy­right is still with Helen –I just have exclus­ive pub­lish­ing rights for this blog.

  9. Mark said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:43 am

    @sulcalibur: Yes, but I think that was part of the brief. Intric­acy and del­ic­acy was indic­at­ive of the era. I’ve still got some tweaks to do on the image and siz­ing I think to get them look­ing their best.

  10. Ethan said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:44 am

    Wow, Mark. What a per­fect com­ple­ment to the design. Just lovely!

  11. Vladimir Carrer said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:44 am

    Wow, simply pure beauty!

  12. yannis_ said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:44 am

    Yes, this is indeed a beau­ti­ful work that per­fectly fits your lay­out. Con­grats to both of you for that.

  13. TheFella said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:47 am

    These are fantastic!

  14. Matt Farina said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:52 am

    Beau­ti­ful. Please pass on how amaz­ing we all think they look.

  15. Gonzalo González Mora said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 am

    These drop caps are amaz­ing! I love the G :)

  16. Scott Jones said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 am

    These look great, atten­tion to detail is amaz­ing, very unique. Would be inter­est­ing to see them used slightly big­ger, maybe break­ing out on the left.

  17. Mark said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:08 am

    @scott: I was think­ing that myself :)

  18. Paddy said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:09 am

    It’s fant­astic to see some­thing so far removed from the gradi­ents and reflec­tions of the cur­rent web. I love them.

  19. Jamie Huskisson said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:13 am

    I really like these :) Great job Helen!

    Can’t wait to read the inter­view, it should be a fas­cin­at­ing read.

  20. Andrew said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:14 am

    I think the classi­est thing you’ve done here Mark is cre­ate some visu­ally stun­ning, but kept it highly access­ible too — truly pro­gress­ive. Lovely stuff.

  21. Sulcalibur said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:16 am

    @Mark — If that was the brief then they are superb. I actu­ally quite like the rus­tic feel, because they have been sketched and scanned rather than put through the vec­tor route.

    They do look good large, but you are right, they do need tidy­ing, espe­cially when res­ized for the site.

    Com­pli­ments to the creator! :)

  22. Peter Gasston said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:37 am

    Very nice. Quick tech­nical ques­tion: any reason why you’ve used a list of attrib­ute select­ors (div.post span.cap[title=“A”],div.post span.cap[title=“B”], etc) instead of the sim­pler div.post span.cap[title] to apply to all? Future proofing?

  23. Mark said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 6:39 am

    @peter: I’m using a sprite, so I needed a way of com­bin­ing the Word­Press plu­gin (which does this auto­mat­ic­ally) and also show­ing the cor­rect cap for the let­ter. If you get my drift.

  24. Five Minute Argument said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 7:01 am

    Wow — stun­ning. Any plans to con­vert them into a real font?

  25. Chris Pacheco said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 7:14 am

    These are beau­ti­ful :D

  26. thismat said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 am

    These are gor­geous. Busy, yes, but that’s exactly the style you were after for the site no?

    Though I think a link to more of her work is in order!

  27. ChuckEye said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 7:58 am

    Look­ing back a hand­ful of pages it would appear that the dif­fer­ent let­ters, while being the same size letter-wise, are taller or shorter in their orna­ment­a­tion above or below, lead­ing to a vary­ing num­ber of lines to be shif­ted for the drop depend­ing on the char­ac­ter (looks like 4 to 6 in the few I’ve seen here so far). For some reason when I think drop caps, I want a more uni­form block size and baseline, but that may just be me.

  28. Thomas said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 7:58 am

    Very beau­ti­ful and they fit the gen­eral look of your web­site really well. Congrats.

  29. Mark said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 8:21 am

    @ChuckEye: Yes, that’s another thing I want to resolve, but it involves mak­ing some fairly sig­ni­fic­ant changes to the under­ly­ing struc­ture of the html to allow for things to go ‘above’ the content.

  30. DAVE said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 am

    A per­fect fit for your site. Com­ple­ments the sim­pli­city the rest of the lay­out pro­cesses nicely.

  31. Gareth Brown said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 10:41 am

    Very beau­ti­ful, but they don’t look like they will scale too good. But i do like a lot. Nice one Mr Boulton

  32. Claudio Luís Vera (@modulist) said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 10:43 am

    These are beau­ti­ful, Mark. Kudos on get­ting them out. I’d even wear them on a shirt, if you should ever con­sider mar­ket­ing them.

  33. Mason Wendell said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 10:45 am

    Mark, these are ser­i­ously beau­ti­ful. I’d espe­cially like to know the inspir­a­tion behind that H. So much character!

  34. Mark said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 am

    @Claudio Luís Vera: I hadn’t thought about shirts. I’ll have to ask Helen — I’m sure she’d be up for it :)

  35. Susan MacPhee said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    I’m impressed with the CSS you used to pos­i­tion the “w” and second Claudio’s shirt idea. Thanks for shar­ing the beau­ti­ful font work too.

  36. Deja said on: November 2nd, 2009 at 2:14 pm

    I am now very inspired to design my own drop cap set. I was recently inspired by the Daily Drop Cap site, and now this inspir­a­tion just sealed the deal! Thanks for sharing.

  37. Galen King said on: November 3rd, 2009 at 2:48 am

    That really is fant­astic. Thanks for shar­ing. I love your work and your approach to design. Cheers.

  38. Daus said on: November 3rd, 2009 at 3:15 am

    So lovely!

  39. Harri Kilpiö said on: November 3rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm

    Just looked through sev­eral old posts. This is really fant­astic work! Look­ing for­ward to read more about the design work and ideas in the interview.

  40. bee said on: November 4th, 2009 at 1:17 am

    They just fit per­fectly into your site!

  41. Weekly Round-up ~ Nov 8, 09 Edition | ClearType Press - Building a Better Government Web said on: November 8th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    […] New Drop Caps […]

  42. edgar said on: November 12th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    this is what i call art!

  43. aqua rite cell said on: November 16th, 2009 at 10:38 pm

    The Drop Cap are really fant­astic, beau­ti­ful and Elegant.

  44. matt said on: December 4th, 2009 at 1:26 am

    Compe­letly stun­ning, where is the best place to see more of your work?

    thanks

  45. designfollow said on: December 6th, 2009 at 4:36 pm

    great, thank you.

  46. Tom said on: December 8th, 2009 at 6:16 pm

    Wow, those are spec­tac­u­lar! Incid­ent­ally I never knew the proper name for drop caps. Great stuff!

  47. turisuna said on: December 11th, 2009 at 10:40 am

    Wow ador­able, I’m won­der­ing how the ‘T’ alpha­bet will look like :) As if I can have the same drop caps, it would be joy­ful. I Can’t wait your inter­view with Helen. Thanks for the sharing.

  48. Jules said on: December 13th, 2009 at 9:35 pm

    these are abso­lutely gor­geous, but i have to agree with a com­menter above, that a few of the let­ters are a little too over­whelm­ing with the design.

  49. Stephen Emlund said on: December 20th, 2009 at 10:15 pm

    These are amaz­ing. Were they hand-illustrated or done digit­ally? It may be inter­est­ing to have the the top of the let­ter lin­ing up with the top of the first line. so the top of the flour­ishes would be above the first line. 

    I love your blog design as well!

  50. John said on: January 2nd, 2010 at 8:24 am

    Yes, good work on the drop caps. There are many inter­est­ing small details and still the let­ters are clearly vis­ible. They fit the design very well. We want to see more! :)

  51. JenOhs said on: January 21st, 2010 at 1:58 pm

    As every­one else has seemed to use up the word “stun­ning” I’m going to say they’re great. I love the atten­tion to detail in such a seem­ingly small space. Nice work!

  52. Burraco said on: January 28th, 2010 at 1:37 pm

    Great atten­tions to every details, good work! Rss good for me, and all in a small space, great

  53. CSS-Design said on: April 28th, 2010 at 3:06 pm

    Really nice solu­tion for “play­ing with typo”.

  54. Brown said on: May 4th, 2010 at 11:59 am

    That is a won­der­ful art. I love the way its drawn.

  55. Veronica Davis said on: May 26th, 2010 at 8:52 pm

    These are beau­ti­ful and would make a nice little take away for pages with a a lot of text. Great work.

  56. Trey Christian said on: June 22nd, 2010 at 8:14 pm

    I see why it took two months to come up with these. They are really nice.

  57. designiouso said on: July 24th, 2010 at 1:56 pm

    These drop caps are mind blow­ing. I love the G.

  58. Jesse said on: August 14th, 2010 at 2:56 am

    Those are really cool and give the elec­tronic medium a bit of old-world class.

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    Hello. My name is Mark Boulton. I’m a designer, an author, a speaker and I run a small design agency where we work with lovely cli­ents and pub­lish books as we go. This is my blog.

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