Writing Tips | Free Resources

Advanced Writing Tips: Drop Caps

Make your stories more unique — Bonus: Free Drop Caps for you!

H you ever used the drop-cap function here on Medium to give your text a more interesting appeal?

Disclaimer: Custom Drop Caps don’t show properly on the Medium app on mobile. You’ll instead see the regular letters. Since I have at times used or deleted the original words or letters (replacing them with my custom drop caps anyways) they might not make sense on mobile at all. Thank you Anthony Lawrence for pointing this out to me!

I have not. It did not appeal to me and I was unaware of how you could use it in a more advanced manner, making your story truly stand out from the rest. But after I looked into the matter more deeply, I discovered an interesting feature:

Ycan replace the standard drop cap with an image file of your choice to use instead! How cool is that?

Here’s how it works:

Once you have written your text, highlight it and select the option to transform it into drop cap.

It will transform the first letter of your paragraph to use drop cap.

Like it looks right here. But that looks kind of stupid, doesn’t it? I don’t like it at all. Plain, simple. Can’t use italics on it. Nothing.

Click on the drop cap letter and it will show a green rectangle around it.

When you see the green rectangle, simply drag and drop an image file from a folder of your computer onto the letter to replace it. Done.

I have spent hours on the internet trying to find some free to use resources for this feature. But the only stuff I found was either behind a paywall (like another Medium article trying to sell some letters) or consisted of single letters, not a full alphabet or even numbers. I didn’t want to have a collection of letters that won’t go together in a single article.

So I’ve created my own. And I’ll share them with you, free to use.

I have created a total of 16 sets in different styles. They all contain 112 items each:

• All letters from A to Z
• Numbers from 1 to 15
• Numbers with ellipses (1.) from 1 to 15
• Spelled numbers (One to Ten)

As well as the following common sentence starters:

All, An, And, As, At, Be, But, By, Did, Do, For, From, Get, Have, He, Her, Him, How, If, In, It, It’s, Me, My, No, Not, Now, Of, On, Or, Out, She, So, That, They, This, To, We, When, Why, Will, With, Yes, You

Nyou can give each of your stories a more creative touch by using drop caps in different styles.

Do you like the lord of the rings? Use “Celtic Narrow”.

Or maybe you want something more modern? Then go with “Martina”.

If you want to download the packs, just click here (Dropbox). You can either download them one by one or download the file named “DropCaps_16Styles_KevinB.zip” which contains all other files.

All zip files contain just folders with the png images inside. Save them on your computer, and just drag and drop the images over your drop cap in Medium. I haven’t had time to test all of them on how they look when in use, but so far, it seems alright.

I noticed two small errors I am too lazy now to fix, after I compressed and uploaded the files already. The numbers from 11 to 15 are not properly named, I forgot to change the XML ID for them when creating them. The word “But” exists twice. Once with the filename “but” and once more with the filename “text5675”.

That’s it for today. I hope someone finds them useful. If not, at least they are free 😂

Kevin is an editor and writer for the ILLUMINATION and Polyglot Poetry publications. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.