 |
| I would like to acknowledge and/or apologize for the many elements of homage (some would say pastiche) on this site and in "The Black Ribbon" itself. All design elements of this page may be attributed to or blamed on me, Miss Cleolinda Jones. Text: All text images on the site were created with a suite of PhotoImpression editors (none of that fancy, convenient Photoshop for me) using the fonts Caslon Antique and Pablo LET, unless otherwise specified. (My favorite source for fonts is 1001 Fonts, which has a searchable database and a function where you can even test-drive your font before you download it. You may also find Font Finder WS useful.) All text, including narratives and letters, is my original creation, which is not to say that the ideas are particularly original, but that no one else has ever arranged words in this order before. Probably not, anyway. Photos and graphics: Unless otherwise labeled, all images were found through Google image searches (and possibly run through a sepia filter). If I have used an image that belongs to you, please contact me and I can either remove it or provide you with a credit on the site, whichever is your pleasure. August 29 Not much to note here, except that the "doodles" are courtesy the Divide by Zero font Tombots 7, with a doodle or two thrown in from House of Lime's Love Poison. In the "suggestions" themselves, there are a few vague references to Horatio Alger, Frances Hodgson Burnett, C.S. Lewis, L.M. Montgomery, "The Queen with Screaming Hair," "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," that sort of thing--it might be more proper to say that the suggestions were inspired by them. The pygmies--well, you'll find out more about that later. September 5 All right, here's where I'm going to get in trouble. All (except one, I think) of the pictures come from MaryPickford.com, and, well--I hope parody is still adequately covered by the copyright laws. I started looking for Pickford shots because I wanted a "Perils of Pauline" feel, that silent starlet look----well, it turns out that she didn't do any of those films (that I know of), but she did play Pollyanna. So my grubby little parody--basically, of the antique Bennet-esque idea that the "less fortunate" ought to buck up and make the best of their ridiculously squalid lot, while at the same time taking a little of the piss out of the good-girl silent stars--seemed meant to be. That, and the pictures just cracked me up, plain and simple. The "title cards" are done in Cheboygan and House of Lime's Dover Chinese Motif Design. September 12 A bit behind on the acknowledgements, aren�t I? All the book cover fonts and graphic dings come from House of Lime again this week�flowers, fans, girls� faces, all of them are font graphics. I ran a GIS for �velvet,� and so the book covers themselves are photographs of velvet overlaid with font graphics and faded a bit using a complex mechanism I like to call �that paleolithic program I got with my digital camera three years ago.� A lot of the titles in the catalogue (fonts: Caslon Antique and HOL�s In Your Garden and Floral Stencil Design) were derived from similar titles at the aforementioned Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls site; failing that, I�ve been known to pick up the nearest book/CD/DVD and scour the credits for any sort of name that leaps out at me. The only significance �Morning Glory� (Cheboygan, HOL�s Art Nouveau Bild and Art Nouveau Blume) has for me is that it�s the movie for which Katharine Hepburn won her first Oscar. �Tom Knox and the China Express� (Cheboygan, HOL�s DBL Medieval Design and Dover Japanese Design) is just an homage to all those Boys� Own Adventure-type books. �Tea for Two� (Cheboygan, HOL�s Art Nouveau Bild and Art Nouveau Blume) is just an attempt to keep that class-conscious satire in there. On the actual catalogue, �Saratoga Scrape� came from a DN&PD title with �Saratoga� in it that made me think of Ingrid Bergman�s Saratoga Trunk, which is truly a hilarious departure for her and worth seeing if only for the comedic value of Bergman vamping around with a Cajun-French accent (and period-appropriate, too!). �Stormy Secrets�� and �Winsome Cathleen� were directly derived from actual titles, I think, as were a few others, I�m sure. There are three authors who appear by name in the titles; you�ll want to keep an eye on them for future installments. September 17 �Sookie Plumberry-Clearwater� is a joke that originated on Short Attention Span Theater�I posted an IMDB item about Jude Law going under the completely low-key name of �Mr. Branchflower,� and off the top of my head quipped that when I want to fly under the radar, �I go by Sookie Plumberry-Clearwater.� (Not that you really care, but I think the name came out of the soup of my thoughts thusly: �Sookie� from Igby Goes Down; �Plumberry� from something I had read the day before, can�t remember what, but I was left thinking, �What the hell kind of name is �Plumberry�?; and �Clearwater� from Harry Potter.) No sooner had I pressed �publish� than it occurred to me that this was a name begging to be used on the BR site. Travel agent Phil Fogg (font: plain Times New Roman) was a more calculated name�if the reference doesn�t immediately come to you, ask yourself what �Phil� might stand for (besides Philip). I owe a lot of credit to Lonely Planet.com, whose site I pillaged for travel pictures, and theirs are excellent. The pictures really do correspond to the places listed in the captions; I didn�t think to make a list of place names and photographers credited as I went, but that�s something I ought to do ASAP. The brochures were designed while I had a Disney cruises brochure on my knee. They don�t look anything alike, but I used it for style reference�the way the entire page is taken up with graphics, the way the text is sometimes laid out, the cheesy slogans, etc.� and I wanted them to look reasonably real, taking the limitations of my software into account. That, and I used to sign up for every single travel brochure listed in the back of a magazine, much to our mail carrier�s horror. I know my travel brochures, man. On the �Solitude� brochure, the third, I don�t know if that�s actually Hanging Rock (or if Hanging Rock is even real), but it is a picture taken in Australia, and my first thought was that it really was Hanging Rock� �Holy crow, in a travel guide? Do they offer picnic packages to tourists or something?� Okay, the boots aren�t really at �Front Porch, Alaska.� I was typing �Front porch in Alaska� and accidentally capitalized the P, and decided to make it sound like the name of a town. The font for all three brochures is Effloresce. September 26 Nothing very meaningful here�again, authors and titles were either derived from the Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls site or from whatever names I saw in the room around me. And, of course, a reference back to the very first letter. The �artwork� is a cannibalized book plate (I�m hoping the crappiness of the cutting-and-pasting will be chalked up to the fact that it�s mocked-up artwork in the imaginary world of the story) and a painting I like very much, but I don�t know the name or artist. All I know is, it seems to be used on stationery at the Victorian Trading Company a lot. The font is, again, Cheboygan. Preview #1: I would like to have the installment printed online like this in Caslon Antique, but I am NOT putting the pages out in graphic form because I go crazy enough just trying to create the letters that way, and since Caslon is a pay font, I don�t know that I could effectively code it into the web page (i.e., not many people would have the font). So this isn�t a literal preview of how the installment will look�it will probably be plain text Times New Roman, as this page is. Preview #2: A visual preview�if possible, I want to keep including little visual surprises and �cookies� when I post the installments. (Someone gets an invitation or a telegram, you can click to see it, that sort of thing.) No, you will have no idea who �A.M. Seward� is even after reading installment #1. That�s why it�s preview #2. Fonts: Caligula Dodgy, Tattoo, and House of Lime�s Frames. |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|