This is a guide on how to create artwork for officially-licensed Rocky Horror Picture Show merchandise. I've created this guide as a "how-to" due to the fact that, over the years, the quality of officially-licensed RHPS merchandise has been in steady decline since the 1990's. RHPS fans, as you might know, are sticklers by nature, myself included. This extends to the merchandise that they buy. With these tips, you should be able to create a quality product that will entice RHPS fans everywhere. This page is broken into five different sections:

1. Colors
2. "Lips" image
3. Fonts
4. "Double Feature" Logo Line Spacing
5. The word "The"

1. Colors:

Taken from materials sent to the Fan Club by 20th Century Fox, here is the color for the classic red "blood" lettering:

2. "Lips" image:

In 1990, a poster was sold that incorrectly showed the image of the famous lips logo reversed horizontally from the original poster design. Since then, a lot of officially licensed merchandise has copied this erroneous design, including the RHPS 3D Light Box (see #3):

3. Fonts:

When using the "Double Feature" font (available on this site), most designers simply type out the letters for the words in the font to create the logo. However, while this looks okay, there are special characters in the font, in which every character in the can look unique, just like the original logo:

Here's how to do it... Using the instructions listed on the font page, type these:

Option A. whole words (for when the logo is to be displayed in a straight line):
"The": ALT+0251
"Rocky": ALT+0252
"Horror": ALT+0253
"Picture": ALT+0254
"Show": ALT+0255

-or-

Option B: individual letters (for when the logo is to be displayed in a curved line):
"The": Capital-T, ALT+0192, Capital-E
"Rocky": Capital-R, Lowercase-O, Lowercase-C, Capital-K, Capital-Y
"Horror": Capital-H, ALT+0193, ALT+0195, ALT+0196, Capital-O, Lowercase-R
"Picture": Capital-P, Capital-I, Capital-C, Lowercase-T, Lowercase-U, ALT+0197, Capital-E
"Show": Lowercase-S, Lowercase-H, ALT+0194, Lowercase-W

With option B, you might have to tweak with letter spacing.

Alternately, you can use Character Map (Windows) or Character Palette (Mac) to find the characters and copy them into your program. Also, some of the characters have a different capital or lowercase letter, good if you want to vary how the letters look.

The "Double Feature" font has been used on many items of official merchandise, including, but not limited to:
• Action figures (Flatt World)
• Trivia game (USAopoly)
• T-shirts, postcards, keychains, stickers, decals, air freshener (Electric Inks)
• RHPS 3D Poster (McFarlane Toys)
• Posters, postcards, matted prints (Import Images of New York)

There are also other fonts available:

• "Rocky" (by Astigmatic) is also commonly used
• "Rocky Horror Picture Show" is NOT recommended - In addition to "Double Feature", I created this "experimental" font that ended up being leaked to the Internet. It was used on one official piece of merch - the Rocky Horror Light Box, sold at Spencer Gifts. I recently found a pic of this item on the Internet, and decided to make a few notes...

...If the design was correct, I would have bought this item in a heartbeat. Instead, I was embarassed that my crappy font ended up on the thing.

4. "Double Feature" Logo Line Spacing:

When using "Double Feature" to create the logo, it's best to space the lines so that the "drips" overlap into the text below. A good example is the picture for #3. Use your own discretion.

5. The word "The":

When re-creating The Rocky Horror Picture Show logo, it is customary to include the word "The" in the logo. Some merchandise has left out the word, and it looks just plain odd. In contrast, when abbreviating, RHPS is the most commonly used phrase (as opposed to TRHPS).