Type designer

I’ve always designed fonts for the brand identities I’ve worked on. From an Oxford College, to a famous London theatre, to an award-winning hotdog stand – a unique typeface gives an organisation a differentiated and long-lasting voice. They are a lot of work, but I’m absolutely convinced that they add a lot of value.

And like every designer, I’ve always had side projects going on in the background. Stories (because every font has a story) and doodles and half-finished faces have sat waiting for attention. Now I’m getting the time to bring them to life.

Veloce (named after the Alfa Romeo that I had sat in a garage for years waiting for some TLC) is the first of the bunch out for general release, and hopefully I’ll get the time to finish some more.

Veloce
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What started out as a single weight agency house font has become eleven weights, from a very thin Thin to a really quite rotund Fat, and language support for over five billion people – including the Pan-Nigerian, International African, Pinyin Chinese and Vietnamese character sets. Because, of most common global languages that use the Roman alphabet, only half are European, and it’s good to be able to say Hi to everyone.

TAP TO TRY AND BUY

Consort
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Next in the pile of things to do…
I saw a poem typeset in an old metal version of Consort at an exhibition I was helping curate, and fell in love with it, because unlike most Clarendons, which are rigid and sombre, this was coiled and energetic. When I found out – after a little research at St Bride’s – that it was an out-of-favour type from Yorkshire foundry Stephenson Blake, the die-hard tyke in me knew that I wanted to bring it back to life.

Verity

Les Verity was a stonemason in Hull, and a good friend of my Grandad’s. On the night my Grandad died, Les, who was in his eighties, scaled the gates of the cemetery where my Grandma was buried to steal her gravestone so that he could carve Grandad’s inscription below hers. He didn’t want Grandad to have to suffer the ignomy of a machine-cut stone.
There’s a heaviness and a simple beauty to the old man’s chiselled letters which I’ve loved since I was a kid.