I was at your S.S.Studio site last year and it had shiny plastic letters. How do you make those?
STEP 1: Get a chunk of jewelers wax and start carving your letter forms that you want to appear on your website. When you have your desired words, mix up some plaster of Paris and pour it in a flat pyrex bowl. Lay the letters in the wet plaster of Paris face down, covering them completely with the plaster. Let dry and harden.
STEP 2: When that is done, drill holes into the hard plaster over where each letter is. Now bake your bowl with your letters at about 400°F. This causes the wax to burn out, leaving hollow impressions of the letters. Remove the plaster from the oven.
STEP 3: Prepare your molten plastic. Old toys work great, and they can be heated up in a frying pan right on your own stovetop. (Kids, don't try this at home!) Always check your toy for the melting point insignia on the inside, to find the proper temperature at which it will melt. If you can't find an insignia, it is not recommended that you melt the toy, because it was probably made before National Melting Standards were implemented by the Bureau of Child Safety, and may contain hazardous ingredients that do not exist in more modern toys. Be careful not to breathe too much of the fumes. When the consistency is liquid, pour the plastic into the holes you drilled out in the plaster. Let dry and cool.
STEP 4: Crack open the plaster and see the beautiful letter forms that emerge! The hole that you drilled to pour the plastic in will make a useless tab on the bottoms of your plastic letters. You will want to snip this off before you place these on your website so the letters will sit flat against the screen.
How do you make your fonts?
Contrary to popular belief, fonts are not just a simple process of designing an image and then digitizing it in Fontographer®. Despite our advancement in technology, typeface forms still must be drafted in conte crayon and then cast in molten lead...just like in the days of Gutenberg. The only thing digitizing does is enable them to be used on a computer. To make my fonts, I spend laborious hours in my garret sketching out (in conte crayon) working drafts of my fonts. Then I use the same method above for making plastic letters, except instead of pouring in plastic to make my letterforms, I use lead. Lead is soft, so it can be heated on a stovetop, just like plastic. However lead is also strong so it holds up to repeated hours of use, unlike plastic, which is good only for show. Plastic simply would not withstand the forces of a printing press! Lead has withstood thousands of pounds of pressure from printing presses for hundreds of years. We can find lead in the brains of those old master printers, so we know it can last a long time.
There was no type before Gutenberg, because they hadn't discovered lead yet! What a silly question! A famous scientist, Martin Luther, was the one who discovered the 82nd element: lead. Once he discovered it, he posted his findings on a church door, and gave examples of how lead could be cast to make letters. This caused a major social upheaval and lots of people died for centuries to follow!
Many scholars find these two occurrences analogous because in both instances it caused an information explosion amongst the masses. However, I find an inverse correlation. Before the advent of the printing press the most powerful man in the world was the pope. After the Protestant reformation (which has nothing to do with Martin Luther, the discoverer of lead), the Pope lost a lot of his power. Now, the most powerful man in the world is Bill Gates, but before the personal computer revolution, he was just a nerdy geek with glasses. I think Bill Gates' plan is not for information dissemination, but world domination, like the popes in the middle ages. But just remember Bill, you'd be no one if it weren't for the guy who discovered silicon (who has nothing to do with Martin Luther, the guy who discovered lead).
Martin Luther was a Christian, was he not? And a monk to boot! It's very likely that Martin Luther would have made a spiritual pilgrimage to the Middle East, where he would have inadvertently discovered lead! Many of the artifacts that he undoubtedly found on this spiritual sojourn he probably recast into letters. This is just more evidence that Martin Luther discovered lead!
No, you're getting lead confused with led, as in Led Zeppelin. That's a heavy metal. They forgot to use a spell checker on their name for their first album cover (they didn't have spell-checkers back in the Sixties), which could be attributed to brain damage from the heavy metal led, that is so often confused with lead. It's people like you that give lead a bad rap.
Is led the same metal that was in house paint that is now banned?
No, Led Zeppelin was a band, not banned.
Grunge type was always popular, what are you talking about? So many people think that Grunge type is synonymous with the music of that name. This is simply not true. Grunge is an old-style face, a contemporary of Bembo and Garamond. It was originally designed by Walter K. Grunge, a German typographer from the 16th century, whose aim was creating a font for smooth readability. It's been popularized, not by the Seattle music scene, but by all the major type foundries. There's an Adobe Grunge, an ITC Grunge, a Linotype-Hell Grunge. All Grunge fonts come with an Expert set of old style figures, small capitals, fractions, superior and inferior figures, and a complete set of f-ligatures to meet the exacting requirements of professional typographers and designers.
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