font_designer: Tim Barnes

Picklepie

Picklepie font

Picklepie was created by Lydia, aged around 6 at the time, for use in her own artwork and things like party invitations, birthday cards and secret files. It looked so lively, happy and original...

Pigeonpie

Pigeonpie font

Pigeonpie is the second font created by Tim Barnes’ daughter Lydia, aged 7 at the time, following the success of her debut Picklepie. It’s flighty and unpredictable, with a smile on its face and...

Message Of The Birds

Message Of The Birds font

A handful of these spiky, sprightly letters made up the twittering title page of ‘Message Of The Birds’, a song by one Flora Warner, found in stacks of crumbling scores on an old upright...

Out Back

Out Back font

A twice-painted sign in Tobago’s back country was the seed for this weird grab-bag of chunky, slightly sleazy letterforms.

No Liming

No Liming font

A chunky, laid-back typeface inspired by a hand-painted notice on the doors of a mechanic’s workshop in Plymouth, Tobago. Two different mostly-uppercase alphabets in one font help to keep things loose. ‘Liming’? hanging out,...

Lemon Flower

Lemon Flower font

A flower became crushed in the door frame of the studio (a fancy shed at the end of an overgrown garden)… pretty pale yellow stamens scattered on the floor… I sprinkled some on the...

Galerie Simpson

Galerie Simpson font

An entirely strange, illogical and inconsistent font packed with inappropriate curlicues and appendages “translated and composed” from a few words on a crumbling fragment of Victorian sheet music. It was developed to form the...

Pegasus

Pegasus font

Pegasus scrapes the DNA of a great twentieth century painter who scattered text across his work like no other… not any kind of facsimile, but tough, playful, adaptable display type forged from the bones...

Coo Coo

Coo Coo font

So I made five rather odd characters for a logo for a friend… Then I thought I’d fill a couple of spare hours expanding it to a single alphabet… And some considerable time later...

Ply

Ply font

So the lumber was cheap – just a pile of offcuts – and so was the carpenter… And you couldn’t say he was exactly lazy, but he was certainly efficient… mostly he would just...