It’s been almost a year now since I last shared a typography inspirational roundup with “Some Amazing Works of Creative Typography“. And now here’s another one showcasing 30 inspiring pieces of 3D typography. You may have seen many similar 3D typography showcase around but I tried my best to feature the freshest among the best, so hopefully these mind blowing 3D typographic pieces will provide new inspirations to everyone.

Typography in itself is one amazing art form that most of us find really interesting and appreciate whenever we see some really awesome artworks through magazines, posters, brochures, or web. And creating these kind of typographic artworks in 3D is not an easy task. Most of these amazing pieces are done in 3D softwares like Maya, 3D Max, Cinema 4D or Lightwave in combination with such pure skils in texturing, lighting and creating 3D objects and elements present in the design. Adobe Photoshop or other image editing softwares are usually used for post-processing these artworks by adding topping it off with realistic elements and backgrounds.

I’m pretty sure there are many more latest and inspiring 3D typography artworks out there, so if you know any outstanding pieces that you think are worthy mentioning here, don’t hesitate to include it in your comments below.

1. Maximum Grunge by GrungeTV

2. Word Search by osbjef

3. Verdana Type Factory by Paul the Illustrator

4. Wash Your Hands by BK1LL3R

5. Earth Day by FaMz

6. Adidas Originality by Steve Flowers

7. Sammii by marcinxp

8. Grunge by chapter3d

9. Calibre by denzoo

10. On us by Shinybinary

11. Waste by Andro Conde

12. Coffee Socks by Andro Conde

13. 50th Anniversary McCaan Concept from Nylon Studios

14. Bauhaus Architectural Typography by Chris Labrooy

15. Helvetica Architectural Typography by Chris Labrooy

16. Star Crossed by xtreamArt

17. Try-type by til01 / Stayros til Georgakopoulos

18. Jesus Iso by Thomas Pavitte

19. Ingratitude by Tomaturge

20. Fresh Style Words by Michele Zamparo

21. Gettin Loose by Luke Lucas

22. Can’t get enough of this byAlex Beltechi

23. CMYK – Colour Your World Project by Markie Darkie

24. Typography is Everything by Simon Page

25. Chaos Type Experiment by Alex Beltechi

26. Some Type Of Wonderful 2010 by Luke Lucas

27. Let there be light by Jeff Osborne

28. Type Illustration by Alex Beltechi

29. Faith by Loswl of INSPIKS

30. Broken Mecore by Michael Schmidt

In as much as I’d like to feature some hand-picked free fonts today, I couldn’t do so and I’m not exactly sure why. I might be just too lazy to scan and sift through thousands of sites offering all free fonts or just don’t have enough inspiration flowing. But still, I would like to do another round-up of selected free fonts one of these days and probably have a regular one maybe at least once a month.

But if you’re all hyped-up and doesn’t mind searching for some tasty free fonts, then head on to some of my favorite sites offering awesome collection of free fonts. I only listed 10, but I hope this is enough to keep you busy, and besides, I’m not sure if there are still other free font sites worth mentioning here. If you know any other free font sites that are worth it, please mention it in your comments.

1. 1001 Fonts

2. Abstract Fonts

3. Acid Fonts

4. Creamundo

5. dafont.com

6. Font Squirrel

7. FontCo

8. Fontica

9. Type Now

10. Urban Fonts

Heres’ a quick and easy tutorial on using Adobe OpenType fonts. I never knew how awesome these fonts are until I used them and discovered their features. OpenType® is a cross-platform font file format developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft. They are superset of the existing TrueType and Adobe PostScript Type 1 font formats. Aside from their cross-platform portability feature, they also provide rich linguistic support, powerful typographic capabilities, and simplified font-management requirements.

Ok, enough of those claptrap, let’s get on with the show. They say that typography is as sophisticated as the finest bottle of wine. So we will try to demonstrate OpenType by starting off with a bottle of wine and wrap some text around it using one of my favorite font, the Bickham Script Pro, which incidentally is an Adobe OpenType font. We will work on our text and enhance it using some of the typographic features of OpenType to produce our final image shown below.

Let’s start it off with a regular looking bottle of wine shown below.

We open it up in Adobe Photoshop. Then we type our sample text using our OpenType font, the Bickham Script Pro. Let me also tell you that Adobe OpenType fonts can be distinguished by the word “Pro” which normally appears as part of the font name. The bottle text in normal Bickham Script Pro appears similarly like the one shown below.

From within Photoshop, you can use all these OpenType special characters by selecting your text and opening the “Character Palette” and clicking the fly-out arrow to open the fly-out menu. From the fly-out menu, click “OpenType” to reveal the OpenType settings as shown below..

The problem with using OpenType in Photoshop is that we cannot preview what characters are available for a particular font. So it’s going to be a hit and miss thing. What we are going to do is switch to Adobe Illustrator so that we can use the “Glyphs” palette of Illustrator which is not available in Photoshop.

So what we do is select all our text, open Adobe Illustrator, create a new document, and paste our text from Photoshop. Now this is where our creativity begins. From Illustrator, go over “Window” menu, select “Type” > “Glyphs” to open the Glyphs palette.

Now let’s select our first character “S” of the word “Special”. While selected, click the “Entire Font” from the Glyphs drop down menu and select “Alternates for Current Selection“.

Now you will see from the Glyphs palette all available alternates for the currently selected glyph (S). All we have to do is double-click the glyph that we want to replace the current selection. Selecting the middle one for the letter S will make our word “Special” looking really special (see below).

Select the other letters (C, h, L, F, A, O) and repeat the entire process. After changing all those letters, we will have something like the one shown below. You can select and try with as many characters as you want until you are satisfied and created a more balanced design.

Another cool feature aside from Alternate Character is the “Discretionary Ligatures”. These are alternate special characters for a group of glyphs. Let us select “st” from the word “August”. While selected, scroll down again the Glyphs drop down menu and select “Discretionary Ligatures” and select something similar to the alternate “st” of the word August shown below.

Cool. Now we can go back to Photoshop and wrap those text around our bottle. Simply select the new text from Illustrator and replace the old text in Photoshop.

We will add a little distortion effect on our text so that it will look like wrapping around our bottle. Go to the “Layer Palette“, right click on the text layer and select “Warp Text“. The Warp Text menu will pop-up. Click the “Style” drop down menu to select “Arc Upper” because we want the curvatures more on the upper part and straight towards the middle of the bottle.

Adjust the curvature settings so it will appear accurately wrapped around the bottle’s contour. My settings were 15% Bend, O% Horizontal Distortion, and 10% Vertical Distortion.

As a final touch, copy the bottle highlight color shown below as the text color using the “Eye Dropper” tool to realistically match the white text with the white highlight of the entire photo.

That’s it. Once more shown below is our final wine bottle with text wrapped around using and harnessing the cool features of Adobe OpenType fonts. Please be reminded that you’ll also find OpenType support in Adobe InDesign, so everything that you’ve learned here will also work and apply across the entire Adobe Creative Suite.

Here’s something for everyone to learn more about Adobe OpenType:
Adobe OpenType resource page

We cannot reiterate enough the importance of typography in design. The quality, precision and balance of geometric forms can deliver each letter and character the elegance and sharpness they deserve, besides conveying the message in a more convenient way.

Professional designers use premium designer fonts. And designer fonts need not be expensive. Anyone can have them free these days. But free fonts need not be cheap looking either. There are many free fonts out there that are well-crafted and functional. And to save your time searching them online, I rounded up 15 of the most popular and professional free san serif fonts available on the web.

It’s not that I am biased against serif fonts, I also like to use serif fonts from time to time, most especially for long but easy to read text on print. But we cannot deny the more or less accepted and unwritten rule of typography on the web; sans-serif is good on screens, whereas serif is good for such type on paper. Heavy or bold serifs also work well either way on headings. Serif lovers need not fuss over san serif’s limelight today as I will try to feature some of them next time. 

Download links directing you to the source site are available for each font. Just make sure that you carefully read the license agreements as some are restricted for commercial use and they can change from time to time.

Alte Haas Grotesk

Bold


Download link: Click here

Ambrosia

Download link: Click here

Aurulent Sans

Regular

Bold
 

Download link: Click here

Days

Download link: Click here

Diavlo

Book

Bold
 

Download link: Click here

Federation Wide

Download link: Click here

Fertigo Pro

Download link: Click here

Grandezza

Medium

Heavy
 

Download link: Click here

Libel Suit

Download link: Click here

Often

Download link: Click here

Perspective Sans

Regular

Black Italics
 

Download link: Click here

Quicksand

Book

Bold
 

Download link: Click here

Raspoutine

Demi Bold

Download link: Click here

Surface

Medium

Download link: Click here

Vegur

Regular

Bold

Download link: Click here

Text makes up the vast area of gray in books, reports, magazines, print ads, and hundreds of other documents. Reading the material is the most essential and primary goal so it’s the designer’s job to ensure that the text is even, flows effectively and pleasant to read. It should bear the two qualities of a good text type which are legibility and readability. Legibility refers to clarity; it’s how easily one letter can be distinguished from all others. Readability refers to how well letters relate with each other to form words, sentences and paragraphs. Essentially, everything else taken into consideration, the driving factor to consider is about moderation or being medium on all sides.

Here are seven valuable tips and hints in choosing the right and effective typeface for text that’s smooth, clear and readable.

1. Choose a typeface with similar character widths

Typefaces with similar character widths have the smoothest appearance. Reading basically has a rhythm and it can be disrupted by typefaces with varying character widths like Futura (below).

2. Pick a typeface with medium height-to-width ratio

Letters are identified by their physical characteristics like bars, stems, curves, loops and so on. The clearer they are the legible they are to read. As they get compressed or expanded, they get distorted and makes them harder to identify.

3. The medium x-height

Lowercase characters height are commonly attached to its x-height. Characters with larger the x-height are more denser or crowded in appearance. But what we want medium; so consider the x-height carefully. Remarkably tall or short x-height characters are better suited for specialty projects.

4. Observe small variations in stroke weight

Small or medium variations in stroke weight ease out line convergence which helps the eye flow and read smoothly. Try to avoid extreme variations similar to modern styles (below, left); at high resolution their beautiful but superthin strokes disappear in a glare. Too squarish geometric styles (below, right) vary little or not at all and are too uniform.

5. Lookout for mirrors

Geometric typefaces like most san-serif fonts are so uniform that their letters are often mirror images. Thus using them for text is not an ideal choice. The basic rule is, the more distinct each letter is, the more legible the words will be.

6. Stay away from typefaces with overlarge counters

So what are counters anyway. Counters are the enclosed spaces inside letters. Typestyles whose counters are very large in relation to the stroke weight should be avoided. Take a look at Avant Garde (below), note how huge the space inside the letters is than the space outside. Those large holes works like a vacuum; drawing the reader’s eye and disrupting the flow and slowing the rythm.

7. Avoid too much twists and oddities

Typographic opulence are fun to look at and sometimes appropriate on some headings, but they wear out their charm fast in text. Why is it so? Those extra swashes gives the eye too much strain making it hard to follow and is very tiring.

Favorite Text Faces

While many typefaces meet the requirements of readability, legibility and good looks, the following four typefaces are the ones we normally turn to most often:

Adobe Caslon
First choice for books, Caslon may be the Roman alphabet’s most readable typeface. They may not be beautiful, but strung up into sentences and paragraphs they fit in snugly and can be read comfortably for hours. Caslon will withstand even the tightest leading.

Adobe Garamond
My personal favorite. Garamond is easy to read and elegant. A little on the dressy side, Garamond is a fine display face — rare in this class — and as a result can carry a document all by itself. Garamond set is a bit small. Set it at ten-point minimum with about ten percent extra leading.

ITC Stone Serif
Stone is boring to look at but buttery to read. Characterized by its stubby, lowercase r that stucks snuggly to its neighbors, Stone is designed for outstanding fit. Stone is a large set, so nine-point is as big as you should go. Use at least thirty-five percent extra leading.

Janson Text 55 Roman
Janson holds the middle ground between the earthen, robust nature of Caslon and the elegance of Garamond. Rounder and denser, it has chiseled, staunch appearance. Janson sets are average size, which you can give about twenty percent extra leading.

Here are some easy on the eyes, pillow soft fonts that you can use on logos, product labels, or any other marketing or advertising materials of products like fabrics, bath tissue, soap, baby items or anything that conveys something soft and gentle.

You can also use them as headline fonts for food, health, religious, children or women’s magazines or newsletters, or any publication materials that you want to communicate as clean, neat, soft or feminine. 

The soft font pack consists of 12 kinds of fonts in different weight types like light, condensed, normal, italics, bold and black.

Download Link:
Soft Pillow Font Pack 

Some more font freebies for everyone here in GDFR. 100 cool graffiti fonts for all hip-hop bee-bops out there. Personally, I’m not a graffiti font fan (I’d take grunge over graffiti anytime), but I love graffiti artworks. Check out some of these cool graffiti arts.

Nice. Maybe sometime I’ll try to feature some of the best gaffiti arts around the globe here in GDFR.

Here some screenies of the fonts included in the 100 graffiti font pack.

Download Link:
100 Graffiti Font Pack – 5.25MB

It’s a cross between science and design geekiness, but nonetheless brilliant and ingenious.

Designers Squidspot created the table, with fonts arranged roughly into related group columns showing. They’ve also ranked each roughly according to popularity according to a number of sources. Each cell of the table lists the typeface and a one or two character “symbol”, the designer, year designed and a ranking of 1 through 100.

Typeface ranking was gathered from various sites and statistically sorted, combined, averaged and finally given an overall score of 1 to 100.

This table also grouped each typeface categorically by families and classes san-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.

I’m just glad some of my favorites are listed like Formata, Minion, Myriad, Officina and Optima.

You may download the full and larger image below. Print, frame and hang!
The Periodic Table of Typefaces – Large Image

Do you like dingbats? I do love dingbats. Most of the time I rip them off and use them as vector graphics. All you have to do is type the dingbats in Adobe Illustrator, select the text then go to Type > Create Outlines, instant vector clipart. Dingbats are not so popular and most people and designers take them for granted and would only use them often as bullet points. So what are dingbats anyway? Old friend wiki says:

A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a “printer’s ornament” or “printer’s character”. The term supposedly originated as onomatopoeia in old style metal-type print shops, where extra space around text or illustrations would be filled by dinging an ornament into the space then bating tight to be ready for inking.

The term is continued to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that had symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters.

I’ve rounded up a few most commonly used true type font dingbats and some fancy ones for download.

Carr Dingbats

Davys Dingbats

Dingbats Regular

Dingbats Thin

QT Dingbits

Wingdings

Split Splat Splodge

Geobats

WC Rhesus B Beta

It’s been a while since I posted the first font freebie here at GFDR. Here’s some more, some of the best Free Grunge Fonts around. There are tons of free grunge fonts on the web but I would like to save you some time in choosing the best. This is just part 1, so expect some more on next part.

Maybe next time we’ll delve into some grungy type of designs. In the meantime, enjoy these 10 free grunge fonts.

1. Heroin 07

2. Inked God

3. Bright

4. Chipset

5. Choice

6. Good Luck For You

7. Razurada

8. Refused

9. Report Error

10. Grunge Serifia