Saturday, April 16, 2011

I'm bringin' Billhead back!

What is billhead you ask? Billhead, a cousin of letterhead, was a highly decorative engraving used on receipts from around 1860 to 1940; these works were incredibly detailed, almost always one color, and were used as one of the initial counterfeit security measures for purchases. The detailed engraving was similar in style to a dollar bill or stock certificate, and they made it nearly impossible for anyone with nefarious plans to steal and return merchandise for cash; remember this is a time where credit cards and even checks were nonexistent. 

A few fine examples of billhead to whet your appetite:





You can see that the details were limited only be the skill of the engraver and the depth of the client's pockets.

One of my new year's resolutions for 2011 was to take this as a retrospective year, going back and looking at the best design concepts from history, learning their styles and finding a way to keep them alive and updated. I printed out my standard quickbooks invoice, and as I looked it over to make sure it was right I started thinking about how boring it was. How many of us have invoices that look something like this?


It was time to sit down and design my own billhead.

I spent the better part of 2 months looking at examples of billhead, letterhead, panel shapes, scrolls, engravings of all kinds and I finally put pencil to paper (yup, I still draw things out, I know it's a lost art but it has significantly increased my productivity) and came up with a concept sketch.


Sometimes you don't have a sketchbook handy when the thought hits.

I sat down in illustrator and started laying out the shapes, and I decided that the wheat and rope were superfluous; they didn't really add anything and would have forced me to take the address and contact info out of the design, which I didn't want to do. What I came up with was this

A little detail view


My only frustration is that the computer is too even. I might work to make it more "flawed". The scrolls were really fun- and I couldn't have made them happen without Jimro on deviantart's incredible lineart brushes. Huge thanks also to Letterhead fonts- They've got the BEST period fonts, period! I've found myself collecting more and more of their fonts, and this design incorporates 5 of them- Brewer's Bold, Bank Note, Billhead 1900, Essendine and Goldsmith Script. The contact info is in Chopin Script.

The final product



Now, which would you pay first?


I love the look, what are your thoughts? Would you like to try and create your own billhead?