That's beautiful. Are the letters commercially available or did you make them somehow and looking at the album how did you do the wheel hubs, are they cast?

William.

Top notch work Richard!

The only comment I make on your lettering is this: To anyone versed in the history of lettering design, the style you have chosen does not match the date of the original. Unless of course, your water cart was made after about 1927. In typeface terms, it might be Futura, or Spartan, or one or two others – I would need to see other letters to be more certain.

I wonder if there is enough interest in this 'arcane corner' of design history (from an ME point of view) for an article about matching the letters to the job?

Regards – Tim (who once, long ago, designed typefaces for Amstrad)

I've dabbled trying to recreate realistic period signage with Inkscape and found it to hard to identify modern fonts to do authentic ye olde lettering, for 3D and ordinary paper printing. I found it necessary to mix and match letters from various fonts, and to individually modify certain characters and punctuation by editing the splines of the underlying glyphs. Tedious and imperfect.

Although I suspect many early cast-metal signs used home-made fonts that don't match anything standard exactly, I'm certain part of the problem was my general ignorance of font families and not knowing how styles changed over time.

Any advice on finding or making period correct fonts would be most welcome.

Dave

Good specimen of the appropriate font, here: **LINK**

http://www.whoisgeorgemills.com/2010/07/wallis-steevens-george-uncle-dudley-and.html

MichaelG.

They look close enough to me a good job Richard. Many times when modeling something if it is built to exact scale it just does not look right so a little artistic licence is required to make it look correct.