I am always in search of truly unique ephemera, or at least I have been since I wandered down the digital design path. Every so often I will find something that I think is truly wonderful and unlike anything I have seen before. I stumbled on a book from the late 1800s of type. And if you have been here ever you know I love me some fonts. Even my daughter knows how much I loathe Comic Sans – and don’t give me that “it’s great for what it is and does what it was designed to do” malarky – it’s ugly and lazy and I hate it.
Anyway, what caught my eye in this book was the sample pages of heading for imaginary newspapers. The first few were interesting, like Evening Whispers and Talk of the Town, but some of the subsequent ones were a hoot. Every page flip and they got wilder and funnier.
My vision is they would make fab belly bands or bookmarks in junk journals – I mean I think they are fun just as they are
Those are just a bog-standard crops, but with a little effort I feel like it could become so much more! And the samples to demonstrate the typefaces? Hysterically bizarre.
Lots of just really weird little elements that are just crying out to be used in some way:
It’ll be fun to have a play over the weekend to see what I can come up with. I have a few ideas. but we’ll see if they come to fruition.
I have also been working on a .. kit, I guess, of more postcards, daffodils and bees. Pretty happy with where I am but not quite done yet! All those flower images need serious cleaning up and the tricky thing with both white and yellow images is so often the old paper and backgrounds are close in colour to the actual images you want to extract. moan about this a lot, it seems, because where some colours might be super easy, others are a nightmare. Compare the contrast of the red iris on the creamy yellow background to the yellow flower on the yellow background!
The iris is a few click and a little edge-tidy. The daffodil is an hour or more to get it really clean. Worth it:
You can see I also moved the stray frond to place it “better” (to me!) and that was a bit extra to do. To be fair I probably go OTT on the clean up. What I am realizing is that for this kind of collage? edges that aren’t perfect are not going to matter. The stray pixels will melt into the background when the background is a similar colour to the original background. If I want to offer the image, cleaned up, for printing and cutting or for use in digital designs, well that is a different story!
Oh yeah – I am well and truly down the rabbithole now… LOL!
Still working on the ATCs in the background tho, so not totally giving up on messy art yet…
scrappystickyinkymess 
31/03/2023 at 9:13 am
Ah, comic sans, the marmite of fonts! I don’t hate it, don’t think it’s lazy, but I wouldn’t choose it over other clear and legible fonts. I kind love how it wound you up just to talk about it though! Of course I’m late for a WOYWW comment, and definitely choose to comment here to shield my eyes from your ATC planning, I feel shame! I think you’re right, you probably are over doing the clean up on the images…but at which point do you stop? Don’t ask me?!
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