Daniel Solis

Student illustrator Luke Frost just posted some great illustrations of creatures from Iain M. Banks' novel Matter . These illustrations use the free font Marain Script I designed last September. Very cool! Check out more on his blog: » Coloured Vapor Collective: Holse's Notebook

The last Marain font was so popular , I decided to take another stab at it in a different style. This time, the letterforms are based on Herculanum. (Herculanum is sort of a younger sibling to Papyrus in that it is often over-used, but not nearly as egregiously as its big sister.) As with Marain Script, I imagine this font being used by an ancient culture (lowercase-c) who adopted the language of the Culture (capital-C) long ago. This time, the font actually has all the proper Marain characters, too. They're mapped according to the chart on the right. Once again, I used Fontifier to create this font. I am looking for another font creation tool that won't make the characters so pixelated. (Update: Mark Sherry was kind enough clean up the o, O and @ so they're a bit less pixelated.) If you have any suggestions that are just as easy with better results, I'm open to any ideas. » Free Download: Marain Ancient » My previous Marain font: Marain Script » More about ...

Marain Script was featured on the homepage of Iain-Banks.com and on this MetaFilter post! Awesome. There is lots of great feedback from the Iain Banks forum on this thread , too. Thanks for sharing it, folks!

Here's a new free font for you to install: Marain Script. It's my first one! I'll be using it in Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple . I used a web service called Fontifier, so the quality works best at small sizes. At large sizes, you see the slight pixelated corners the web service creates. At small sizes, those pixelated corners just look like a grainy texture that fits an alphabet written by a brush. Hey, happy accidents! The letterforms are based on the Marain alphabet, from Iain M. Banks' "Culture" novels. In those novels, the spacefaring Culture use the Marain alphabet because each character is unique and can be read in any rotation. That seemed to make sense for use in Do, since the monks and pilgrims are not bound by gravity either. » Download MarainScript.tff Marain Script by Daniel Solis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License . » More about Marain » More about the Culture novels » More about Fontifier