We’ve been working on refreshing our product lines since we bought Carriage House Designs and among other things, that means choosing some new fonts.
If you’ve ever done any graphic design or even made a flyer or tried to pretty up a Word document, you’re aware that there are a lot of fonts out there in the world. A LOT of fonts. Like, a mind-bending number of fonts. SO. MANY. FONTS.
If you’re like me, you have new favorites all the time to add to your repertoire of old standbys. When you start making stencils from fonts for the purpose of sandblasting (or “surface preparation,” as they call it in the biz) you are able to weed some out. Ha! If you’re a stencil person, you know what a clever joke that is. “Weeding” is the process of pulling the letters and images out of cut vinyl to create the sandblast stencil. Fonts and designs that are too intricate, with lines that are very fine, are terrible for weeding.
It’s a lot of responsibility to pick fonts for designs you hope to use for some time; it’s kind of like getting married to just one person. But I did that, so I figured I could do this. I was searching for a particular font I’d seen where we buy our marble and lo and behold, I found this really cool website that sells really cool fonts that – wait for it – are actually based on fonts long used in the monument industry! Jackpot! Not only are they lovely but they are also historically appropriate, which I like.
There’s a lot of great information on the site for the Monument Lettering Center about the history of monument lettering and the history of sandblasting, and this is in addition to the monument fonts they sell. Check it out!
