I am trying to have some custom decals made by Rail Graphics and need to prepare some art work. Is there any special program I need for doing railroad fonts and how do I draw the logo?
You can use any font you desire. From Railroad to funky. Times New Roman is very close to Railroad Roman. As far as your logo, you can use any drawing or graphics program you desire. Jeff Augsburg & Concord R.R. (a fictional shortline in Central Illinois) http://www.pegnsean.net/~revnjeff
I have just been through the same thing. I already had Corel Draw, and I don't know how to make fonts, so what I did was to use the "import" feature of Corel Draw to load .jpg images of the engines and cabooses I wanted to make decals of. Next I used the freehand tool and drew a series of lines, connecting the dots, around all the letters and numbers I needed at high magnification. For letters like A and numbers like 4, I did not draw all the way around them, but instead drew a line through those letters and numbers to trace the inside then back to the outside to finish tracing. This is just like creating those characters as though you are making a spray paint stencel. When you go to high magnification, you can move the points so close together that it looks like a solid fill. It took me 8 hours of work to create the NP slogan "Main Street of the Northwest", but now I can resize it to any scale I need, and use it on all kinds of NP equipment. The logo went fast, taking only an hour to create a fully scaleable monad. Now if I had the money, I would buy a program called "Fontagrapher" to create my own custom fonts.
I also use Corel Draw to do my graphics/decals. It's a great program to use because it uses a vector graphic method rather than bitmap (simply put, you can scale a vector graphic to any size without losing resolution) For fonts, there's a group at yahoo called "rr-decals" that has some railroad type fonts in the files section. Alternatively, if you want to go with something 'different' - try FontFile.com There must be thousands of fonts to download there. Comes in handy for personalizing your rr scene or anything else that could use a neat font. If you don't have acess to Corel, whatever you use to create your logo "the bigger the image the better." This will help with resolution when your decal provider scales the image down. You might try asking Rail Graphics for an image size suggestion depending on your application. Lastly, a little known vector graphic tool that most of us have access to is right inside MS Word (Excel & Powerpoint, too.) If you use the Autoshapes feature (on your menubar select "View" then "Toobars" then "Drawing") Autoshapes will let you draw, color and layer several different shapes, even freeform shapes. Not as easy as Corel, but in a pinch it might work. Good Luck! Regards, -Mike
