Papyrus alternatives and textured display lettering

Where it came from

Papyrus was drawn by Chris Costello in 1982, when he was twenty-three, working by hand over roughly six months. He has described being interested in how lettering might have looked written on papyrus in the ancient Mediterranean. It was released through Letraset and later bundled with widely distributed operating systems and office software, which is how it reached almost every computer on Earth.

Its most visible modern use was the title treatment for the film Avatar in 2009, which is what turned a widely available display face into a running joke.

What creates the texture

The effect comes from controlled irregularity, and each element does a distinct job.

• Rough, eroded outer edges, as though the ink had bled into an absorbent surface or the surface itself had crumbled.
• Uneven stroke weight along a single stroke, so no line is the same thickness end to end.
• High, irregular contrast between thick and thin, closer to a brush than a pen.
• Slightly unstable baselines and letter heights, so the line does not sit perfectly flat.
• Occasional sharp, extended terminals that suggest a stylus rather than a nib.

Drawing textured letters that survive conversion

Texture is the hardest quality to convert, because texture is fine detail and fine detail is exactly what a threshold and a tracer are inclined to discard. The trick is to make the texture large enough to survive.

Draw big. Texture that measures a millimetre on a sheet you photograph at arm's length is a few pixels wide, and a few pixels is indistinguishable from noise. Draw at three or four times the size you think you need and the same texture becomes unmistakable structure.

• Work on rough, absorbent paper — watercolour or cartridge paper — and let the ink bleed into the grain.
• Use a dry brush, a worn marker or a bamboo pen. A perfectly smooth pen cannot make an imperfect edge.
• Vary the pressure through each stroke so weight changes along its length.
• Let the letters sit slightly unevenly rather than aligning them to a rule.
• Do not add texture in an image editor afterwards. A digital noise filter produces uniform speckle, which reads as dirt rather than erosion, and the tracer will discard most of it.

Converting without losing the roughness

This is the one case where the default settings need help. Detail decides how small a feature survives the trace, and texture is made of small features, so raise it. Smoothing rounds corners, and eroded edges are made of corners, so keep it low.

Background removal deserves care too. Set it too aggressively and the light, dry-brush parts of a stroke vanish, taking the texture with them. Set it too gently and the paper grain becomes ink. Move it slowly and watch the preview rather than the number.

Using a textured face well

Textured display faces are for headings, titles, packaging and posters — places where the letters are large enough for the texture to be visible and there are few enough of them for the irregularity to stay interesting. At paragraph size the texture becomes fuzz and the irregularity becomes hard to read.

One warning worth taking seriously: a texture that evokes a specific culture or historical period carries that reference whether or not you intended it. Use it where the reference is appropriate, not as generic decoration.