For those of you DragonQuest fans that wanted to use the familiar DQ logo font, I have good news- you no longer have to use that ugly pretender to Thalia, the font used on number of SPI games, including Swords & Sorcery, Barbarian Kings, Arena of Death, and, of course, the DragonQuest line. The fake Thalia (which goes by either Thalia, Thalia Regular or Thalia Normal depending on where you find it) that has been available for the past 10+ years can be kicked to the curb where it belongs.
I would like to direct your attention to Thaleia, a really nicely done clone of Thalia (the real one) that is available at most of the usual places you can find free fonts. Below is a side by side example of "DragonQuest" using both fonts. For the sake of the comparison, I had to almost double the point size of Thalia just to keep them in the same bracket.
It wasn't necessary for me to show the other numerous flaws in Thalia Normal as they are pretty apparent, even without the comparison. It's a really badly done knockoff- so bad that I've refused to use it, even when I could make corrections in Adobe Illustrator.
Below that are examples, making use of their respective names, with the ubiquitous Helvetica there as a control. The flaws are punch-in-the-face obvious simply using the font's own name. So much pain, so much pain...
Note that the art department at SPI altered the "s" a bit and the cap "D" is both larger and has a lowered baseline than the example here, which hasn't been tinkered with by me.
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| Click image for a closer look |
Thaleia available for free here as well as a number of other sites. Use it with gusto!
UPDATE: I discovered after I'd posted this article that there is, indeed, a "lazy s" as part of both the original Thalia and new Thaleia character sets. This mean that my statement above about SPI is now null and void.
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