Good letters from the Goodland

Lately I’ve been on an epic fontsploration of the signs, letters & historic type of Goleta, the community just north of Santa Barbara, for a font I’ve been wanting to make since long before I started Swell Type.

1. The Inspiration

Back in 2008, I snapped these pictures of some wonderful painted block lettering on the side of a warehouse just a block off the main street.

According to Goleta History, the building was erected in the 1940s, and you can see the lettering has been there from the start! Amazing that it was never removed or painted over as it changed hands over the years.

2. The Name

Goleta’s nickname is “The Goodland”, which comes from its years as a fruit-growing region. And wonderful things still come from the Goodland, like Deckers shoes and Flir cameras and Seymour Duncan guitar pickups!

I generally think of Goleta as the suburban area where my kids go to school and play soccer, and we hit the big box stores on the weekend, or the annual Lemon Festival for lemon pie, lemon bars, lemon everything.

But while Santa Barbara is cute and charming, Goleta is hard-working and no-nonsense. Get in, get your toilet paper and trail mix and Ugg boots, and see ya later.

So GOODLAND seems like a great name for this sturdy, no-frills style. And it incorporates the G from “blacksmithing” with its unusual sticky-out bit, which along with the funky angled K, can set it apart from the many, many versions of this style of lettering (and fonts based on it) that I’ve seen.

My 2008 phone pictures were pretty lo-res, so I went back to get some better shots. While the letters are still intact, now they’re blocked by piles of stuff. Disgrace!

The building is now home to a construction equipment rental shop. So I went in, mumbled something about maybe needing to rent a front-end loader soon, climbed around the tractors and tried to get decent pictures of all the letters.

The letters are still in great shape. Lead-based paint may kill you, kids, but it sure lasts!

3. More References

The next step is to dig into my vast folders of reference pix for similar styles. I found this shot of an orange crate with a matching round-topped A and N (but sticky-IN G) that I’d taken a mere block away, at my friend Anne’s Santa Barbara Gift Baskets shop (also in a cool old Goleta warehouse!).

The lovely metal letters below adorn an otherwise nondescript concrete building just off State Street in downtown Santa Barbara. They’re thinner and a bit fancier, but share a lot of the same structure, especially the rounded A, M, and N, and straight across S.

I traced a few letters of the BLACKSMITH sign in Illustrator, and decided to bring them into Glyphs to build the rest.

4. The Construction

The great thing about making geometric-shaped fonts is that a few letters can quickly be used to form others: rotated A becomes U, Wand Y, G can become C, O and S, and so on.

And there we go!

I made a curve-topped N to match the M, but look back — the original sign has a diagonal-line N! THIS MAKES NO SENSE.

And should it have a curved-leg R like the orange crate, or straight-legged to match K?

Ahhh, I’ll decide later, or better yet, make ’em Opentype alternates so you decide! Opentype features are wonderful for relieving us designers of having to make the tough calls.

After finishing the bold alphabet, I duplicated it and thinned and narrowed it like “Modoc Substation”.