Benoda is a series of modern comic book typefaces inspired by the great Ben Oda, whose exquisite hand-lettering appears in comic books, comic strips, and more, published from the 1940's to the 1980's! These typefaces were all inspired by Oda's work at EC Comics during the early 1950’s, specifically in Two-Fisted Tales, and I hope you'll enjoy creating with them as much as I enjoyed creating them!
Our final offerings from the Benoda family are Benoda Titling [based on Oda's Two-Fisted Tales titles], Benoda Nuts [based on Oda's Mad titles for the early comic-sized issues], and Benoda Prep [based on Oda's prepositional and conjunctive phrases used to free up space in longer titles.] These three faces comprise a set of versatile tools for classic, vintage titling. For those of you looking for the "total package," all three are available in the Benoda Titles Bundle!
Like the other Benoda faces, both Titling and Nuts offer plenty of contextual alternates to help avoid repetition and mechanical appearance. If you don’t already know, contextual alternates cycle through multiple glyphs in most graphics programs, breaking up repetition and imbuing the text with an hand-drawn feel. The differences in Benoda are minor, but add just enough "randomness" to make the text flow as if it came directly from the tip of a Speedball. And the best part is, you don’t really have to do much to make the magic happen, just make sure your program works with contextual alternates and make sure they’re turned on!
Within each Benoda typeface [excluding Prep and Cursive,] are three alternate glyphs of A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and a few common punctuation marks. Additionally, there are a whole mess of international diacritics so you can create in almost any language using latin roman glyphs! And while Benoda is geared toward comics lettering, it works wherever you need a bit of hand-lettering!
So what's in the Benoda Titling Bundle package? You get the Benoda Titling, Benoda Prep, and Benoda Nuts typefaces in both TTF and OTF font formats plus the FREE 32-page Benoda specimen book PDF! Not certain if Benoda is the right typeface family for you? Head on over to www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1483421 and you can browse or download the FREE PDF spec book which has hints, tips, history, and full glyph maps of all the Benoda typefaces, plus release dates, and a few fun surprises thrown in. Once you've decided to love Benoda, you can even order a ridiculously overpriced hardcopy of the spec book, certain to someday become a collector's item!
Well, that's it for Benoda! We'll be back in a month with something different, or maybe similar! Until then, have fun, be nice, and remember: At Category4, things could be worse!