Helvetica is the font I associate with family trips to San Francisco in the ’70s and ’80s. As my little geek brain was becoming attuned to fonts and signs, Helvetica was one of the first fonts I recognized, on generic shopping center signs, the big painted text on the GAP store at the corner of […]
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 […]
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, […]
This font started out exactly a year ago as a “proof of concept” — a font I built just to see if it could be done. The initial test told me yes! But since then, it’s proven nearly impossible to finish. Every time I hit a wall, I’d put it aside and work on something […]
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. Way back in 2008, I snapped these pictures of some wonderful painted block lettering on the side […]
As my latest font, Silver Streak, nears release, I wanted to catch you up on my progress, and share some of the process that went into making it. This one started with a single bit of inspiration — this nifty lettering on the side of the “Silver Platter” diner & gift shop at Disneyland’s California […]
To countdown the final days of the Paradise Point introductory sale, I re-created nine classic surf posters using it and some swell surf pix by Swell’s own Forest Dempsey. […]
Paradise Point was birthed from the single-weight Pleasure Point I designed for Comicraft back in 2014. This was another font (like Hyperspace Race) that I always wanted to make more fun and extensive, with wides and bolds and extra features and such. And it’s finally here! My first step was stretching and pulling the tall […]