With an early career spent working as an apprentice sign painter, Charles Borges de Oliveira eventually found himself exploring type design. Having worked in the manual art of sign painting, he had long since established an innate sense of good design, one that was deepened with further education on the mechanical side of letter architecture and design layout.
While he still provides hand lettering through his studio, Borges Lettering, Charles has also built an impressive portfolio of digital type designs that have been used by graphic designers around the world. Some of his more notable clients include NBC and American Greetings – the single largest greeting card company in the world.
Charles’ work is consistently well crafted, but his work goes further than just fonts. One of his more recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Old Stock II, a collection of Adobe Illustrator actions that make it incredibly easy to take any font of your choice and turn it into a three-dimensional work of art.
Yeah, we were awestruck by the idea, too.
It took Charles quite a while to figure out how to make Illustrator produce a true two-color highlight shadow – something that has never been done before. In fact, it took four months of banging his head against the wall and numerous prototypes to get it right. Once he did, he took it another step further and made it produce seven different true cast shadows, and an inside shadow, on top of it.
The results of his efforts are something that every designer can benefit from. The possibilities are truly limitless with Old Stock II because of its ability to produce such a wide range of vector shadow effects. Some of the effects that can be achieved with this set include inside shadow, inside shadow with outline, drop shadow with highlight, and outline with drop shadow and highlight.
This set includes 39 high quality actions, giving designers the option to choose from left or right in terms of light and shadow direction. If you thought this set was only for graphic designers, you’d be wrong: type designers can even use the tools included in Old Stock II to craft their own layered fonts!
There are basic and pro versions included and both are easy to use. There’s a handy scaling reference chart included, as well, and Old Stock II works with Illustrator CS3 through CS6, and Illustrator CC.
If you’re curious to see it in “live” action, you can watch a quick tour of Old Stock II and also watch a tutorial on how to use it.
With Old Stock II on hand, graphic designers can turn any type design into an intriguing display font perfect for signage, large-scale displays, headlines, logos, product packaging, merchandise, apparel, posters, flyers, and more.
Borges Lettering currently offers 13 products through YouWorkForThem, including his first iteration of vector letting actions, Old Stock – an equally impressive set that enables designers to apply all sorts of texturing effects and engraved styles to any font they choose. If you’d like to check out more of Charles’ work, visit his portfolio and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you won’t miss out on any of his upcoming additions!
