About Swell Type

A child of 1970s and ’80s San Francisco Bay Area, I saw my hometown of Sunnyvale transform from cherry and lemon orchards into “Silicon Valley”, the birthplace of Apple Computer, HP and Atari.

Attending the same public schools as Apple co-Steves Wozniak and Jobs, I not only got to hear fantastic tales of their legendary practical jokes from my teachers, but was the beneficiary of their generosity, as Wozniak had donated roomfuls of Apple II computers, on which I learned to program vector graphics and musical notes into BASIC while in elementary school.

After high school, I moved to Los Angeles to study graphic design (with a minor in Rock Star) at UCLA. Not long after graduation, I was introduced a freelance comic book letterer named Richard Starkings. He needed an assistant to enter text into his Apple Mac using QuarkXPress and a font he'd created based on his pen lettering.

As co-founders of Comicraft, Richard and I pioneered the process of lettering comic books in Adobe Illustrator, developing the techniques that set the standard for the industry.

In the 1990s, Comicraft became the comic book industry’s most in-demand lettering and design studio.

After successfully overhauling Richard's lettering font, I was soon building new fonts daily to give each of the titles we worked its own visual style, from The X-Men and Spider-Man for Marvel, to Superman and Batman for D.C. and Astro City and Spawn for Image.

I lettered thousands of pages for those comic publishers, as well as movie, TV and video game studios like Legendary, Blizzard and Riot Games. I also got to design hundreds of logos, including Angry Birds, Avengers, Black Panther and Daredevil, and created the world's largest library of typeface families used daily to letter comic books all over the world.