After reading this thread on Typophile about a new beer label I did a quick search for Hartwig Schrift (the original type for the label) and found this site. It’s got a collection of resurrected blackletter types some of which I’ve seen before, others which I’ve never seen, like Jaecker-Schrift. Some of the fonts are genuinely available for free, but others aren't, so check which is which before using any of them, and buy a license for any you need to. There are some real gems in there, amongst the dodgy ones.

This capital Eth from Jaecker-Schrift for example is really quite compelling. The composition of the diacritic brings to (my) mind Suprematism, or Kandinsky - it’s that dot, almost like a full stop hidden in the character and balanced by the verticals - so perfect! As in the sampler on the page, I’d be tempted to use it as an ornamental ‘D’ as after all, it’s so ornamented it goes far beyond a normal Eth that you couldn’t tell the difference anyway. I’m also thinking of creating a set of similarly ornamented caps to use as cadels with the font. I have a thing for cadels too…

Files can be uploaded, it’s now all working just fine. Finally!

That was probably the biggest pain in the arse of any site I’ve ever had to get going. EE Core installed instantly, I’d got the templates all sorted out already locally (using MAMP, which is awesome) and then the database kept falling over for some reason.

I host with Supanames who are normally pretty damn good (I’ve recommended them to friends in fact) but they’ve beefed up their timewaster controls on support requests. Cue much tediousness of explaining that, yes, I have tried to access the site using a different browser, that I can get to the control panel and a completely new error from phpMyAdmin is hardly likely to be a browser caching issue… but hey. It’s now sorted. Turns out that the database was corrupted.

Sigh.

So. On with the type!