Rainbow Rocket Font

Rainbow Rocket is a colour font following Schaefer Versalien, Lucina, and Filicudi (Ulrike Rausch).

The glyph forms are based on my own found stencil font Arugula; with bridges filled in and various other adjustments made for this design.

The repertoire is fairly limited: Capitals-only base Latin alphabet of A to Z, Æ, Œ, Ð, Þ, 10 numbers, and only a few punctuations and decorations; the only diacritic (accent) supported is the macron (above) and macron below.

User Guide

This font family consists of a number of colour fonts each representing a different colour palette. At time of launch there are more than 20 such colour fonts. Each colour font has identical glyphs and OpenType Layout features.

In summary, the family has:

• more than 20 colourways;
• a variety of decorative endcaps selectable using Stylistic Sets;
• Character Variants for a small number of glyphs;
• accents are supported with pre-built accented letters, such as Ā /Amacron, and also;
• accents are supported with Unicode COMBINING codepoints, but the only accents supported are macron above, U+0304 COMBINING MACRON, and macron below, U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW.

Each colourway is a separate style in the font family, and when several are installed should be individually selectable as a style from within the font family.

On Colours and Palettes

The colours and palettes and their combinations have been a real journey for this font family. I have found them very much organically and opportunistically, resulting in a selection that is neither comprehensive nor systematic. Instead the colours and palettes show various singular moments that were worked into a colour font.

All of the colours and palettes have been tweaked and edited, to provide the best arrangement.

There are a few groups, some of which were intentional, others grew out of the process.

Home and Garden

Colours literally from my home and garden, and occasionally other homes and gardens, including the generic.

Home Green and Home Blue are fabric colours. Home Brown looks like my Nain’s tobacco-stained curtains in the 1970s, but is actually collected from some shades of brown, yellow, and orange i had lying around. 

The accompanying garden series consists of a blue (sky), cherry/pink (blossom), purple (honesty/Lunaria), and red (Acer palmatum). 

Manufactory

Sheffield Brick is taken from a few Sheffield Bricks (my house and in the neighbourhood). Slate only looks like slate, it is sourced from a decorative roundel made of a composite stone material, and isn’t actual slate (probably). NPCT is short for Nibling’s Plastic Construction Toy, a generic name for a collection of branded bricks that they donated to me; since my own childhood, the range of the colours that these manufactured bricks come in has exploded, and i picked out the ones that were more unusual to me.

For fans of Taylor Swift

Inspired by, and using parts of, W. Jake Thompson’s excellent taylor R package, i created a few palettes for this series as a nod to the Taylor Swift fandom. TSLover and TSRedTV are of course taken from the albums Lover and Red (Taylor’s Version); TSSNTV is from Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). Extensive though the taylor package is, it did not have a palette corresponding to the Sunrise Boulevard vinyl pressing of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), so i had the opportunity to exercise just a little creative freedom to create my own, which is TS1989TVSB. Fans can get this download at 100% discount by following this secret link for Swifties.

Cake or Death

The title of this section is a reference to an amusing Suzy Izzard sketch, in which a British interrogator is required by the habits of society to offer cake as well as death, in order to induce their subjects to reveal their secrets.

You however, do not need to choose between cake or death, you can have cake and Death.

The cake is Battenberg, and a variant with similar colours that i have called Bergbatten.

Choose the font style WOD and choose death: the colours are taken fron the literally lethal book Shadows from the Walls of Death; a book which collects physical samples of wallpaper that contains arsenic, bound together so the book can be used to document and warn people away from these wallpapers. The arsenic of course makes the book itself quite dangerous. Luckily for me, the Internet Archive has a scan. The arsenic in wallpapers is mostly from Paris Green, used to make the various shades and tints of green seen in the book.

Miscellanium

A few more colour palettes do not fall into any of the above:

• Adler, based on a brochure for the font Ad Lib, courtesy Letterform Archive;
• Alex, based on Alex’s hair;
• CSD1, based on a Charity Shop Dress (i have quite a bit of additional material for this theme, for additional styles in the future);
• Fedi, based on the 5 node Fedigram, the Fediverse Logo.

Banners and other decorations

ASCII curly brackets, « { » and « } », actually display as decorative terminals intended to be used on the ends of short text displays.

For example, type in as {PYGOSCELIS}:

The above shows the Battenberg style of the font family.

The OpenType Layout font features ss01 ss02 ss03 ss04 can be enabled to select variations on the decoration:

The asterisk, « * », displays more like a decorative star, and the related asterism is a group of three stars.

Character Variants

• /asterisk has a smaller variant;
• capital J has a variant with an uptured hook;

in each case the OpenType Layout feature cv01 selects the alternate.

Ordinary asterisk and J:

With cv01 feature enabled, asterisk is small, J is hooked:

Spacing and Spaces

The standard space, U+0020, is 4 stripes wide. It can be useful to have other widths of space available when composing blocks of particular length. For example, when making a rectangle of 3 lines of text, you might find that you’ve got a blank space at the end of one or two of them; and in order to make all the lines exactly the same length will need spaces of length 1, 2, or 3 stripes in order to pack the gaps correctly.

Unicode has many SPACE codepoints available, and this font series implements three of them for different width spaces:

• 1-stripe width: U+200A HAIR SPACE
• 2-stripe width: U+2009 THIN SPACE
• 3-stripe width: U+2008 PUNCTUATION SPACE (same width as FULL STOP)

On macOS you may be able to use Character Viewer to insert these spaces (they can be a bit elusive, but once found, they are insertable).

On a Linux system, often the ISO 14755 keyboard input sequence Ctrl-Shift U x x x x [Enter] can be used, where x x x x is the hexadecimal code of the Unicode value you want.

Accents and Diacritics and Unicode

Not many accented letters are supported, but as a sort of compensation the Unicode code points for the combining marks U+0304 COMBINING MACRON and U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW work on more glyphs than usual:

• U+0304 COMBINING MACRON (above) can go after C, D, L, N, R, S, T, W, and Z; in addition, the forms Ā, Ǣ, Ē, Ḡ, Ī, Ō, Ū, Ȳ are supported as pre-built codepoints.
• U+0304 can also can after the numbers 0 to 9, in order to put a macron (short horizontal stroke) above them.
• U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW can go after A, B, C, E, G, I, S, U; in addition, the forms Ḏ, Ḵ, Ḻ, Ṉ, Ṟ, Ṯ, Ẕ are supported as pre-built codepoints.

Enjoy!