Cat designs and artworks for use in Photoshop, PSP, Affinity Photo, CorelDRAW etc

CATS fonts

CATS fonts are from http://www.graphicxtras.com, designs are all by Andrew Buckle. The cats fonts set includes one basic font set along with a number of variant designs fonts based on ‘shadow’ ‘expanded line’ ‘3D extrude’ and others. The set also includes the designs in EPS format, this document uses the EPS designs. There are over 1000+ designs included in the set, this document displays only a few of the designs.

Some of the designs are filled, some of the cats are sketched. All the designs originated in Poser (an application now from Smith Micro but originally e-frontier). The application includes a selection of interesting sketch styles. The designs were taken from renders in Poser and then traced using the Adobe Illustrator trace tool, the paths were then further edited and smoothed and modified.

Not all the cats included in the set are realistic (or as realistic a silhouette or sketch can be), some are abstract designs and include embellishment elements. Some of the embellishment designs included in the set were created for use in early embellishment custom shapes packs.

The cats set also includes designs that have a shadow. The shadow effect can be generated by many DTP applications but the fonts have the shadow prebuilt. You can, of course, add an additional shadow to the design say in an application such as InDesign.

The set also includes the basic cat designs but with the outline expanded (using an increasing width stroke), giving the cats a more handdrawn look.

Not all the designs are effective. The variant fonts were created using various effect scripts in Fontlab and most of shadow effects or 3D extrude effects generated decent results but some of the cats have proved a little more catty and some odd point distortions have appeared. Still, instead of deleting the designs as a failed experiment, the designs have been kept as they add a roughness to the usual clean-cut vector world. Some might them more than the cleaner designs.

The set includes many different frames as well as just a single cat design. The circular frames of cats were all created in Illustrator using the windmill plugin that comes with Andrew’s Vector Plug-ins volume 4 ‘Multi-tool’. The plugin set offers many features to create weird and wonderful as well as basic circular designs in seconds.

The set includes a couple of ‘expanded variant’ sets. Fontlab includes a number of variant brush strokes to apply to the expanded path, also varying the size as well as the roundness and angle of the brush stroke can create quite a variety of hand-drawn-like designs.

The set also includes a font set of embossed designs, where the original cat is only just about seen. The cat on the left is a fairly clearly a cat, some of the designs included in the font are even more abstract with only a few lines or chunks of path to suggest a cat - though equally it could be half a dozen other fourlegged animals.

Yet another variant font where the original cat has been vibrated (this is not a real cat so no lovely cats were harmed during this). The generated lines are random so not all cats have the same vibrations. This was created in Fontlab using a python script, generating random chunks of path designs.

The cat on the left was a hand sketched design and the vibration has resulted in an interesting motion design.

This variant font includes the original designs but in ‘bold’. So the cat is just about distinguishable.

Certainly useful for more abstract cat designs

Installation of the cat font is the same as with many fonts, though the graphicxtras fonts have no installation process so adding the font set is a manual process.

On the PC, add the font via the control panel ‘fonts’. On Windows 7 the easiest way is to drag the TTF file to the fonts panel. You can (though not on my system as I have lost the right click feature to install the font) generally just select the font file and then right click and select the ‘add font’ or install font command. Earlier OS, go to the control panel (via the start menu) and select the install new font command from the file menu. On Vista, click the start button, select control panel - then appearance and personalization and then fonts, then select ‘install new font’.

On the MAC, the quickest way is to double click the font and select ‘install font’. Another approach is to use the font book application.

The bold variants include some truly abstract cat designs.

Embossed cat variant font