Here’s a fun one for you to play with. It’s a little utility called Wordle, and it’s available at www.wordle.net. You feed it text and it spits back these cool maps, much like tag clouds. The most common words get the biggest font; it goes down from there. Options abound, including fonts, color scheme, and shape. The main photo is what happened when I pointed Wordle at this site. I find it rather interesting that I can tell a lot about the site simply by looking at the map.

Well, of course, there’s more. I couldn’t help myself, in fact. Next comes a Wordle word cloud from a section of the first Broom book, The Story of the Great American Flying Broomstick Book 1: Genesis. Here it is: Read more…

Fonts

Instead of writing a fourth book in the flying broomstick series, I’m redirecting my thoughts to a “full-blown” fantasy novel, complete with a fantasy world. The working title is The Unexpected Traveler and it will have the usual elves, dwarves, dragons, and occasional talking animals. I think I’ve got some cool twists and I’ll be blogging about it as I write.

But…

One cannot write of elves and such unless there is some special language in which they write. Now my elves are not Tolkien’s elves and don’t have nearly as pretty a script, but surely elves don’t use roman characters! I looked around the Internet for runic and other interesting fonts, but nothing comes up other than various attempts to duplicate what Tolkien and others have already done. And given they own those fonts, I can’t use them.

What to do?

What to do turns out to be simple. Why not design my own font? Is there software that makes that easy? Yes. The one I found is called Scanahand (as in ‘scan a [sample of your] hand[writing]‘). Mind you, so far I’ve only been playing with it. But the image shows some things Scanahand can do. The first two lines are simple. I printed out the template that Scanahand provides, then I printed Read more…

Fantasy, Fonts