Chromosome
It hit me one day that the ’60s-vintage labelmaker I had lying around might make an interesting display face. I began playing with it — clicking out letters at various pressures, scanning the results,...
font_designer: Brian Willson
Emily Austin
An indomitable woman who traveled a lot, Emily Austin (Bryan) Perry was one of the children of Moses Austin, of Austinville, Virginia. Like her famous brother, Stephen F. Austin, she settled in Texas as...
Cedar Street
There’s something satisfying about tweaking to perfection a typeface based on the particular style of lettering applied to a particular kind of paper by a particular human hand. One day, in pursuit of this...
Broadsheet
A full-featured typeface that simulates old newspaper text from the 1700s, Broadsheet gives you all the “long s” ligatures you could ever dream of. Wonderfully authentic in either display type or long blocks of...
Castine
There’s a cemetery in Castine, Maine, a lovely coastal town perhaps best known for Maine Maritime Academy and a surviving crop of stately old American elms, with headstones dating back into the 18th century...
Bonsai
Years ago, I developed an interest in the Japanese art of dwarfed potted trees, bonsai. I bought some books on the subject from Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In one — Handbook on Bonsai: Special Techniques...
Attic Antique
Attic Antique by Three Islands Press. Flipping through a friend’s old hardbound collection of John Burroughs nature essays a while back, I thought it’d be fun to try to develop a typeface with the...
Viktorie
Viktorie might easily be mistaken for the handwriting of a note-taker in a hurry: it looks swiftly jotted down. These energetic characters pay little heed to such arbitrary contraints as baseline or x-height —...
American Scribe
The Declaration of Independence was authored by Thomas Jefferson, but his is not the classic handwriting on the engrossed copies familiar to most Americans. That belonged to Timothy Matlack, an early patriot who fought...
Antiquarian Scribe
Henri Abraham Chatelain was a cartographer and publisher of the famous Atlas Historique, ou Nouvelle Introduction a L’Histoire, a world atlas released between 1705 and 1732 in Amsterdam. A few years ago, at an...