Flower Power Alphabet

FLOWER POWER ALPHABET

Flower Power, Baby! This 1960s-style alphabet conjures the retro vibe of psychedelic album covers, posters for the Fillmore Auditorium & Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, or the original Woodstock festival in the summer of 1969. This lettering design also works well with fun and youthful early 1970s-style product packaging and teen magazine graphics.

Important Note: This is NOT an installable font, but rather a set of colored vector letters (and flowers) that can be pasted together to create a custom headline for your graphic piece. In a matter of just a few minutes, you can copy and paste the letters to spell out a customized headline or product name, apply beautiful curves and contours if desired (using Adobe Illustrator's Object Envelope Distort commands), and presto, you have a lovely, unique, and custom-lettered branding system or headline. And yes, it goes more quickly than you might think.

This lettering is in the grand tradition of classic psychedelia, but has a slightly more eye-friendly and legible take than many of the classics, for more at-a-glance readability without losing any of the essential 'vibe.' For maximum authenticity, curve and warp your lettering design to your heart's content using the Envelope Distort function in Adobe Illustrator.


TIPS FOR GETTING A PERFECT RESULT

1) Don't forget the kerning! This is often the difference between a good lettering design and a great one. After you've positioned the lettering on a straight baseline, give it careful look. Squint at it. Look at it from across the room if it helps. Close up the big wide gaps like you might see between an 'L' and an 'A'. Open it up a bit when dense letters want to dovetail too tightly together. Bottom line: Don't use math or rulers to kern the letters, use your eyes. If it looks too tight or too loose, then it is.

2) If you've positioned individual vector letters before, you probably know that letters with rounded tops or bottoms need to extend a little bit below the baseline and above the cap height line. Example: a rounded capital letter 'O' extends slightly beyond the lines at both the top and bottom, and a rounded capital letter 'U' extends below the line at the bottom only. This extra height (most prominently on bold lettering) counteracts the optical illusion of rounded letters naturally appearing smaller than the rest.

3) Try curving your words, rotate them around an arc, bend and warp them for great results. Adobe Illustrator's Object Envelope Distort is your friend.

4) The colors are editable of course, although in some cases, it may prove to be overly complicated to edit some of the multiple gradient swatches used for creating the 3-d style drop shadows and faux-metallic shine gradients. Experiment, and see what works.

ABOUT THE DESIGNER

Mott Jordan is a veteran typography designer and confirmed lettering fanatic. He has two ITC designs to his credit (now administered by Monotype, Inc.), ITC Hornpype™, and ITC Verkehr™, as well as a large number of limited-release freebies floating around the web, dating back to the late 1990s. Jordan is also an artist, illustrator, animator, 3D designer, and photographer.