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Design in Typography.
Vignette Combinations.

Reviewing the more recent series of Vignette combinations, we find in very few of them any general scheme or underlying idea. MacKellar's first series of silhouette designs (60 characters), may be brought into this category. The grotesque treatment of many of the figures renders them unsuitable for high-class work of any kind. The cat seated on a crescent moon, the angler, and many other characters in this series, can only render ridiculous any piece of work in which they appear. But there are redeeming points. The three border sorts, and the two beautiful floral vignettes which we illustrate below, are in admirable taste, and exceedingly effective when judiciously used.

The second silhouette series (47 characters), by the same house, though containing three or four pieces which may be independently used, is really a combination border, and therefore comes under another category.

Omitting the various series of Allegorical Vignettes, which we intend to treat of in a future article, most of the recent series are mere medleys of crude and disconnected ideas. The striving after originality and novelty has developed the wildest vagaries, and every canon of artistic and decorative law has been outraged.

The Cleveland Foundry has produced two series of « auxiliaries, » the characters in which have no connexion with each other. They have to be purchased just as put up by the foundry, bad and good together, for the price charged for separate sorts, even in considerable quantity, is practically prohibitive. In the first series we have a mixture of pins, suspenders, scrolls, floral corner-pieces, and decorated corners, some of which we shew:

Many of these are pretty and effective; but crude in conception; and it is worthy of note that the continental founders who have copied the designs have re-engraved them all, in order to introduce improvements. The second series is a similar mixture. We have some little birds, the « old oaken bucket, » an easel, and some broken foliage to use outside rule panels.

The latter idea was a good one, and has been beautifully developed by Zeese in his floral ornaments. But the most ridiculous piece of realism, perhaps, ever attempted in type, is to be found in this series.

That is, a representation of a collar-stud, and a border of buttons and button-holes!

It would be difficult indeed, to imagine a greater degradation of type decoration than this.

The combination ornaments of the Dickinson Foundry are equally miscellaneous, though not so absurd. These are a few from series E:—

Why the bird is divided, we know not, unless to avoid casting too large a type, for the figure is quite complete when the pieces are put together. In the same series we have a pretty ground-work, like the cells of an upper-case, with oblique pieces to form a corner. It will be noted that there is a deficiency in this design, a fourth piece being required to make the pattern perfect. A similar fault is to be found with nearly every American combination.

The American « Èlite » Ornaments (by whom designed or cast, we know not,) are really pretty and artistic, so far as we have seen them, and the designer has not been guilty of the errors of taste which disfigure some of the other series we have described.

It is impossible to say where the painful straining for novelty will end. The San Francisco mail just to hand brings us specimens of a series of « Ink-spots, » 13 characters, nonpareil to four-line pica, by Marder, Luse, & Co. They are exceedingly realistic. The idea is not altogether original, ink-blots being one of the features of the Cleveland Foundry's « Ragged-edge » series. Printers may well ask « What next? » If this is legitimate ornament, the blotted exercise-book of the careless schoolboy must be a thing of beauty and an æsthetic delight. It would not surprise us, after this, to see in our American exchanges, a fount of « P.D. Finger-marks. » We can only regard this kind of thing—like the button-hole combination—as decoration gone mad.