Building on decades of experience as a designer of fonts for comic books, video games, TV shows and movies, John Roshell’s Swell Type takes inspiration from the real-world signs and scenery of California to build fun, friendly, functional fonts for your graphic design and branding projects.
80 Weights + Variable Font
3 Weights
45 Weights + Variable Font
24 Weights + Variable Font
25 Weights + Variable Font
25 Weights + Two Variable Fonts
40 Weights + Variable Font
SWELL TYPE fonts are available at
In the Works
The Sketchbook font project – Day Five
Another modular concept! My idea was to create letters that could be rotated 90° to create other letters, for example C > U > N > D and B > M > E > W. Meantime, in making my Japanese/Chinese comic lettering font for Comicraft, I learned that Kanji are constructed by combining several words […]
The Sketchbook Font Project – Day Four
Connected script fonts are always tough, so I saved this one for later in the week! It started with this pair of sketches I drew years apart, with a similar thick/thin connected look. The alphabet was pretty well developed in the sketch, so I traced ’em all in Illustrator: 2. getting them scaled and aligned […]
The Sketchbook Font Project – Day Three
Here’s a concept i’ve been kicking around for years: to design a few basic shapes that can be rotated and flipped around to create all of the letters and numbers. The results are kinda primitive & kinda sci-fi, and I end up coming back to it whenever I’m sketching designs for a sci-fi logo. […]