See the Pen Drop B by Chris Lowe (@alltimelowe) on CodePen.

Set in Gravitas One by Sorkin Type, today’s B works well with a typeface that has extreme stroke contrast. Gavitas One is rooted in advertising display type of the industrial revolution.

For the drop cap I’ve applied a CSS mask-image, inspired by Trent Walton’s post CSS Mask-Image & Text, to reference the printing of the era. Extra decoration is applied with an x offset text shadow and an asterisk printed in an after pseudo element, positioned with EM for proper scaling.