My inspiration for a font can come from all kinds of places. Like every type designer I know, I take tons of pictures of lettering and signage, knowing those can often provide the spark of an idea for a new design.

But I also take lots of pictures of non-letters -- stuff that's just cool and weird and interesting -- without any idea of how I might use it someday.

The story of this font, and its graphics, includes both kinds of pictures.

I just love stencil fonts. They're so practical and utilitarian. The cool-looking gaps in the letters are not there for looks; they're designed to keep the stencil intact and let paint come through the holes to make recognizable letters and number shapes.

And I like seeing the many ways stencil designers have chosen to place the gaps in order to solve that problem.

Graphic designers often use stencil fonts to suggest "military". But I also see them as slightly futuristic, in that horizontally-sliced Blade Runner/Star Trek logo way:

So you can imagine my delight when, one day while waiting for my car to be repaired, I spotted this lettering on a wooden crate:

I'd never seen a stencil font so sci-fi! The crate didn't say what was inside, but I imagined it must be something incredible like a nuclear weapon or miniature spacecraft.

Looking closer at the font (while avoiding the stares of the mechanics) I guessed that it was a stencil version of Microgramma, a.k.a. "The sci-fi movie font" and one of my all-time faves. Since that was one of my inspirations for Hyperspace Race, I thought a stencil version of HSR might be equally cool.

At first I planned to stencilize (new word) the full Hyperspace Race font. But after making the H and E, I realized the narrow sizes didn't look great stenciled, especially in the Heavy weight where the bits were so small it was losing its heaviness and stencilyness (another new word).

The medium widths fared better…

…but the ultra-wides were by far the most stenciltastic.

The lowercase letters, being smaller, had similar issues with the gaps and letter integrity. So I decided that if all-uppercase and ultra-wide made Microgramma a classic, it's good enough for my font!

One feature I really wanted Hyperspace Cargo to have was rounded corners, to mimic the way the edges and corners naturally soften depending on how far the stencil is from the surface when paint is applied.

But how much rounding? I wasn't sure…

Then while building Bearhug, I learned to make Variable corner shapes in Glyphs, which let me generate a nearly-square "Normal", a "Round" as round as it could go, and a Variable axis to choose any amount of Roundness between.

I then went back and applied the technique to of one of my earliest releases, Silver Streak, and it worked perfectly for Hyperspace Cargo, too.

Another change I made to the Hyperspace Race shapes was to flatten the points of angled letters like A, X and K. This helped them sit closer to other letters, making the overall "heaviness" feel even heavier.

The final step was designing a set of "horizontal line" alternates, for the fully sci-fi look.

Once I get rolling on a font, a clear idea usually forms in my head of how it will look when it's finished. The same, however, is rare for the example graphics. What will show the font off, in the right context? What style of design have I not done already? This final step is a large part of why a lot of "nearly finished" fonts sit unreleased on my computer at this moment.

I did have the name “Hyperspace Cargo” from the start, which suggested some kind of interstellar transport vehicle. The graphics could be like the opposite of the "luxury space travel" approach of Hyperspace Capsule, and take the viewer inside the mechanic's shop, a place customers usually never see.

But what does the inside of an interstellar cargo ship look like?

The font definitely looked cool ghosted on the concrete walls of stock photos I found. But why would anyone build a spaceship out of concrete? And high tech surfaces like metal or plastic seemed too clean and neat -- as well as too similar to what I designed before for Hyperspace Race.

So I dug through the folders of pictures I keep of weird abstract things, like glitchy shapes when my computer crashes, or billowy clouds while flying in airplanes. Maybe airplane wing = cargo spaceship?

And then I found these:

Lake Tahoe garage floor, 2011

One summer, while our family was staying in a vacation rental, I noticed this weird circular shape on the garage floor. Someone had probably spray painted something without putting down newspaper, but the result looked like weird radio transmission or the site of a UFO landing.

And then I found lighter circles in other places in the garage, perhaps as the painter picked up the object and set it down again, and it left increasingly fainter traces…?

My family (as always) thought I was really weird for taking pictures of the garage floor (hey, I took pictures of the family, too).

I converted a few of the images to black and white and inverted them (because photos always look cool in negative). They still had concrete texture, but also seemed outer spacey, like the rings of Saturn or nebular clouds…

Next I added text on top. By experimenting with "Overlay" and "Screen" transparency modes, I was able to get bits of the concrete texture to show through, while keeping the font firmly in the foreground, while the background receded intooooo spaaaaaaace…

Industrial AND outer space futuristic -- those old photos were the perfect solution! And Hyperspace Cargo was complete.

See more here or take it for a spin below: