"Filigree" Typography

[Pignut]

For a while, I've been interested in a certain style of typography and would like to find out where I can learn more about it.

Unfortunately, I've no real idea how to describe it, but I'll do my best:

It's a very ornate style with lots of highly embellished letterforms in many sizes, often on curving baselines and typically featuring enlarged, filigree initial capitals. It's used a lot on material featuring 60s/70s "jam" bands like the Grateful Dead and it has a classic, American look to it. It looks quite distinct from the psychedelic era type and seems more finely "crafted". It looks influenced by early 20th century posters and advertising although the style is probably older.

My goal would be to be able to reproduce something with this feel but realise that it is not as simple as using certain fonts! To do it properly would take a lifetime to master!

There are some pointers to recreating traditional type effects in Illustrator in Leslie Cabarga's excellent "Logo Font and Lettering Bible" but I was wondering of anyone knows of any similar resources?

Here's a quick "mood board" showing examples of the kind of thing I mean:

[Toon]

there's not alot of resources because there's alot of freedom with type like that. The best way to start is sketch with a pen and paper then scan it in and draw over the top. If you're not great at drawing or stuck for ideas just pick a font, type out a word and start playing with the vectors and reshaping them until you get some ideas.

[zumojuice]

many of these appear to be the ornate typefaces, with various embellishments. Seeing as fonts came later to some of this stuff, you may find it harder to get direct fonts for them. There are however loads to choose from, and if you don't wish to pay, dafont.com is perhaps a starting point (a fave site here at one point) be aware that being free, the fonts there might be ripped or redrawn and letter spacing maybe messy.

Best thing might be to start with something close and them sketch them by hand or illy and begin to see how they are constructed. Common embellishments appear to be extending or altering decenders and ascenders, and flowing the type around curves and into each other. Illy CS2 had/has a fairly good tool for converting stuff into vectors.