Clair De Lune is part of the famous Suite Bergamasque, written by Claude Debussy in 1890, and published in 1905. It means Moonlight in French, a kind of romantic name. The name is exactly what I had in mind for this übercute font. Clair De Lune can be used to design postcards and posters, liven up websites and give your designs an overall happy feel. Clair De Lune was handmade using a 0.5 pen, eco friendly Italian paper and a wooden kitchen table.

I was listening to an Opeth album called Blackwater Park. By the time I had decided that this font needed some swirls, the band was playing a song called The Drapery Falls - which has the word ‘spiraling’ in it (see poster 2) - and the name was born. Spiraling down is a surprisingly elegant font (given its roughness). I probably wouldn’t set a whole text in it, but it will really stand out as a titling font for packaging or book covers.

Trigomy is a proportional pixel font designed on a 5 pixel grid. It is intended for either very small text or as huge display font for posters and the like. To get a crisp look this font should be used at 10 pt or multiples of 10 pt. (A tip for Adobe Creative Suite applications is to change the standard anti-aliasing method from “sharp” to “crisp” and to align the text to whole pixels. Also avoid centered text.) To get started with type design I thought it was best to start with a pixel font because you don't have to focus much on the design itself, but rather have to focus on how kerning and spacing works and the various features you can implement with OpenType. And of course I wanted to have a pixel font that had all that I was missing from other pixel fonts. We were learning trigonometry at the time I started designing Trigomy, and most of the time I misspoke it “trigometry”. So, when I had to come up with a name for my first font I thought: "Why not go with Trigomy?"

After a lot of time sitting at my desk, creating fonts and trying to figure out how my new software works, I really like to work out a bit. The only thing that I do not like is the music they play at the gym; it is usually a selection of poppy tunes that appeals to a large audience. But not to me. I prefer my death metal - and eighties music, as it brings back a lot of good memories. So, I bought myself some ear buds and installed a music streaming app on my phone. Yes, I know, I am probably the last person on earth who discovered streaming... One day, during a workout session, I listened to a list of eighties music and one song that I had forgotten about started playing: Rappers Delight by The Sugarhill Gang. When I started working on the font, I had to think about the song and named it Square Beat. Square Beat font, other than the name implies, is a rounded, handmade font, ideally suited for books and magazines aimed at a young audience, toy packaging or posters. It comes with great language support, including Vietnamese.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.

Italian type design master Aldo Novarese was not famous for making calligraphic designs, nor had he any interest in them. He is much better known for his text faces, and quite innovative sans serif and decorative designs which became the definition of what we now know as techno and modern. But in 1968, Novarese surprised everyone with a fantastic flowing deco script entitled Elite. Novarese's formula of simple soft curves and toned-down swashes makes for one of the most unique alphabets ever seen, not to mention one of the best flowing and most legible scripts. This is now its digital incarnation, named Fontella. Fontella's applications are virtually limitless. This is the sort of script that can feel at home pretty much anywhere; a sign, a fridge magnet, a bumper sticker, a greeting card, a movie poster, a book cover, music artwork, magazine ads, newsletter headlines, etc. Digitized from original specimen and expanded with a few built-in alternates and ligatures by Rebecca Alaccari, the font was named after the famed jazz singer Fontella Bass. These letters are just so sweet they had to be called Fontella.

The curves are vintage and the serifs are big. They're so big that for years I never had the courage to tackle this intimidating font. But when fellow signmaker Frank Smith laid the groundwork for this intriguing typeface by Frank H. Atkinson, I couldn't pass on the opportunity to take it from paper to keyboard. After all, at over 100 years old, I felt this alphabet had never been given a proper, digital treatment. So how did this face survive the last century? Well, for those who don't know the history, it survived in Atkinson's ubiquitous book, Sign Painting, published first in 1908, the generational standard for anyone interested in sign-related type design. The layouts and lettering treatments in this book have influenced countless designers for more than a hundred years, but most haunting to me was this strange face with the big serifs. Well, I'm haunted no more. The work is done, the kerning is complete, and nothing but a mouse-click separates a very old idea from the modern world. It's wide, it's big, and with those crazy serifs, it is definitely eccentric-!!!