Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a fan of this sharp sans-serif font that I often saw on ticket stubs, newspaper ads and magazine covers from the 1940s, 50s and 60s: It was so cool and unique, with the sharp points on A & V, and skinny crossbars on Z & e. Even […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
This one has kind of a goth metal vibe to it. I traced a few of the letters in Illustrator, then brought them into Glyphs, and used those pieces to construct other letters. As it started coming together, I noticed the L connecting to the other letters in some interesting ways. Continued it with the […]
These two sketches I drew about 10 years apart are eerily similar. So let’s make a font out of ’em! Here’s a little over two hours of work squished into one minute. Or as my friend Tim Sale once advised me, “52 years and two hours”. […]
The third big source of inspiration for Beachwood came into play when it was nearly finished. I noticed the street sign numbers looked a lot like uniform jersey numbers. Sports is a big part of LA’s history and culture, so I thought, how can I make this the ultimate uniform number font? Warning: we’re going […]
Five years ago I had the mind-bending experience of visiting the Mendenhall Museum in Buellton, an incredible collection of road signs and other car memorabilia. It sits only about 45 minutes north of me, but it felt like a time machine that took me back 70 years: I was especially fascinated by these road signs, […]
I’m finishing up a new font, and decided to test it out on social media by telling the story of one of my first design heroes: Fred Gehrke, who designed the first football helmet logo. He’s a hero in my mind because he saw a cool possibility where nobody else did, and then just went […]
I took some time off this week from making letters onscreen to make some on walls! At the end of last school year, my son’s high school principal asked if I could help liven up the campus over the summer with some signs to help new (and even current) students to find their way around […]