John Murphy Jr. is a graphic artist whose illustration work is strongly reminiscent of the magazine illustration of the 1920s and ’30s. He was trained at UMass & has worked as a painter, illustrator and graphic artist for a wide variety of clients (including Style 1900 magazine) in addition to his regular day-job as art director for Balboni Associates in Springfield, MA. Prints of many of his paintings are available for sale on his website.
I see that Mr. Murphy is providing several Arts & Crafts inspired freeware font files from his site. It seems like you would be uniquely qualified to comment on whether any of them are worthwhile, Joshua. What do you say?
John – some of those are decent, but the quality of the digitization of most freeware type is pretty crappy. A company called P22, based in upstate NY, does a really fine job of digitizing historical faces – although their work is more revival than simply digitizing old pre-existing work. I will post something this coming month about all the great (and high quality) type from this era.
Which ones would you say are decent?
On a side note, our firm did order the Parrish Roman face from P22 a while back because it, when rescaled to distort the proportions, most closely matched a face that a local monument company was using for a columbarium project we designed. It turns out that their face, which they had both as a component of stencil-cutting software and as hard plastic moulds for making impressions in vinyl, was something called ScotchKut Condensed which seems to be a 3M product. Hard to find any information on it, though.