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...
font_designer: Brian Willson
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...
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...
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...
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 —...
Antiquarian
The titles struck me as handsome — the titles and captions and place labels on a page I have of Henri Abraham Chatelain’s Atlas Historique. I’d already modeled Antiquarian Scribe after the neat, slanted...
Douglass Pen
Douglass Pen was inspired by the handwriting of Frederick Douglass, who was born an American slave but died a distinguished 19th century statesman, orator, and abolitionist leader. He also had fine penmanship. Douglass Pen...
Terra Ignota
The idea for Terra Ignota came to me years ago as I was admiring a reproduction of “Amerique Septentrionale,” a 1650 map by French cartographer Nicolas Sanson, given to me by my parents. The...
Botanical Scribe
“The Raphael of Flowers” is what they called Pierre-Joseph Redouté a couple hundred years ago. The Belgian native became famous in France, where he painted floral watercolors for both Marie Antoinnette and Empress Josephine....