HAPPY HALLOWEEN, LOVELIES!

Happy Halloween everyone! I’m celebrating today with kettle corn, Charlie Brown, and a brand new calligraphy font that I made called Dasha!!!

I drew Dasha up with a vintage dip pen and sumi ink, and really tried to keep the bouncing baseline look that is so beloved these days. The fantastic-amazing thing about Opentype is that designers can program fonts to look just like handwriting by adding clever features; things like letter pairs that automatically connect or alternate versions of the same letter, and even different initial and terminal letter forms. If you have access to Opentype software like the Adobe CS suite, you’ll see several ‘tricks’ in Dasha that make it look just like calligraphy:

– a full set of alternate capital letters
– seamless ligatures that automatically connect as you type
– beginning and end-of-word swashes
– a set of elaborate swashed capital letters
– old-style numerals
– arbitrary fractions
– 22 (!) alternate ampersand characters

Most of these fun features also work in recent versions of Microsoft Word (2010 and newer) so if you’re designing your own invitations or wanting to print envelopes that look hand-addressed, you can simply turn on the advanced font options. Yay!

If you don’t have access to Opentype-friendly software, don’t fret — you can still access all of the extra characters, you’ll just need a third party application like Ultra Character Map (Mac) or PopChar (Windows) to view and copy/paste all of the goodies.

Personally, I think Dasha would make some amazing holiday cards! Or maybe wedding announcements?

It’s delicate, feminine vibe pairs well with vintage imagery too. I’m dreaming of gilded business cards!

You can pick up a copy of Dasha in our shop here. Right now she’s on sale for $32, but in a couple of weeks she’ll be available through my vendors too, and the price will go up a bit. Early birds, now is your chance!