The Rewind – Announcing a new Embrilliance Font & Template Collection

Though every leap year, we here at BriTon Leap (creators of Embrilliance) tend to celebrate big leaps forward, sometimes those leaps come with a loving look back. In this case, we’re celebrating National Retro Day with a look at our upcoming release of a retro-inspired and yet trend-conscious collection of fonts and templates that only Embrilliance could make possible.

If you have seen the flood of designs, posts, and even product packages with wavy, warped text that casts an eye back to old-school band posters and t-shirts and wanted to make your own, your day is almost here. There’s a new collection coming this Leap Year Day that makes creating wild shaped text designs no harder than typing text. Welcome to ACE-1: The Rewind! This collection includes 6 hand-crafted fonts made specifically for warping and a whopping 316 ready-to-use envelope layouts waiting for your names, quips, titles, and text!

Behind The Rewind

This collection was created by our own Erich Campbell. He noticed the rise of these retro-styled text treatments in the world of print and knew that his embroidery family wouldn’t want to be far behind. Seeing folks struggling to create their own swirling, shaped, and tightly-packed type treatments, he realized that Embrilliance‘s uniquely malleable envelopes would support wild-shaped multi-envelope templates tailor-made to the task. He wanted to allow anyone to create these warped word-art designs without the manual tweaking and rework they were currently doing. He also realized that many existing typefaces would have problematic shapes that either wouldn’t work well for enveloping or wouldn’t be tuned for embroidery. With all this in mind, he set out to create fonts with the retro style everyone loved, but made with shapes specifically tuned to fill his new, heavily-warped envelope layouts.

ACE Fonts

This all-new collection of specialized fonts and envelope text layouts is the first release of a new type of embroidery font, unique to the Embrilliance Platform, ACE Fonts. You may know that Embrilliance’s envelopes are shapes that combine with lettering objects, warping the lettering to fit said shape. ACE Fonts are specifically made to make this warping look its best. ACE stands for All-Caps Envelope; this means that ACE Fonts are all capital letters, created specifically without the ascenders and descenders that make fonts pull away from the top and bottom lines of those envelope shapes. ACE Fonts even have additional control points built-in to let them hug the top and bottom line of any Embrilliance text envelope, enhancing tracking even with considerably complicated shapes.

The ACE fonts came took their final form when Erich showed his new personal passion project to Brian Bailie, creator of Embrilliance. In discussing the function of envelopes, Brian and Erich traded ideas and technical details about the way shapes deform and the way Embrilliance’s unique envelopes work. Over a solid couple of sessions tossing the details back and forth, hammering out edits and additions to the fonts Erich had created, they expanded these fonts into what became, owing to Brian’s flair for naming, the ACE fonts.

Testing and Teamwork

Erich made some of his own sample work showing the possibilities of the project, but some of the most amazing pieces made so far come straight from the mind and machine of our own Lisa Shaw. She always has her finger on the pulse of our embroidery community, and immediately recognized projects and designs that her friends and followers had in mind. Between discussions and testing sessions with Lisa and Brian, (including the addition of some miscellaneous ‘fun’ layouts spurred by Lisa’s request of a special dino-themed design from Erich) the collection finally came together. This is far from the last you’ll see of our ACE fonts and maybe even of additions to The Rewind, but we think there’s more than enough for our Embrilliance Family to do what they do best, make things their own.

The Library

The Rewind Library contains the following categories: 2 Line Circles, 2 Line Ovals, 2 Line Hearts, 2 Line Hexagons, 2 Line Squares, 2 Line Rectangles, 3 Line Circles, 3 Line Ovals, 3 Line Hexagons, 3 Line Squares, 3 Line Rectangles, 4 Line Circles, 4 Line Ovals, 4 Line Hexagons, 4 Line Squares, 4 Line Rectangles, the aforementioned ‘Fun’ Shapes, Single-Line envelopes, and a set of infinitely stacking envelope sets called Stackables. As you can imagine, each category has a number of designs with stacked, shaped layouts with multiple lines for text already populated with sample words that you can quickly select and change.

The Stackable Category has designs made for creating your own multi-line square or rectangular stacks of lines as high as you can fit in your hoop. They are created to nest neatly from line to line, with custom top and bottom blocks to let you start and end your layouts in different configurations. That said, if you simply want to choose a number of lines, edit your text and font choices, and get to stitching, there are plenty of options in the other categories to fit almost any small phrase.

The Fonts

The fonts in ACE-1: The Rewind all contain basic punctuation, numbers, and most include a basic set of accented letters, all made specifically to fit inside the envelope height. These fun shorter variations with their accents aren’t just scaled down; they’re redrawn specifically to keep the same line thickness of their taller friends. These means your layout won’t break outside of the lines to include basic accented characters.

Leaping Forward

ACE-1: The Rewind goes live and will be on sale this Leap Day, 2/29/2024, so watch the Embrilliance Store for your chance to get in on the fun! Here’s hoping you’ll love using it as much as we loved creating it. If you find that you love the ACE fonts and these templates as much as we do, you should definitely stay tuned.