Seen in downtown Seattle, June 18, 2011. At 1:18, I assume.

wwword, a website about words, did an interview with me [Update: wwword appears to be no longer operating, unfortunately, but here is a copy of the page on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine], where I talked about some of my favorite lettering pieces and how I did them.

The images that accompany the article are a bit small, so I’ve put larger versions up here….

I’ve been interested in the classic script style of the early 20th century for as long as I’ve been drawing letters. It was commonly used in logos and trademarks, meant to convey the idea of a signature. Think: Ford. Coca-Cola. Coors. Blatz. Schlitz. Rainier. Campbells soup. Any number of baseball clubs. The style was revived in the 1960s, sometimes evolving into psychedelic or pop-art forms.

There have been fonts from time to time based on this script style, but quite often they have more of a sixties or seventies look. I decided to try my hand, hoping to get closer to the early 1900s feel.

In 2004, I pitched the concept to House Industries. They liked idea, and we made a deal to develop the script, along with a sans and a serif, all with a “sports” theme.

Working with Ken Barber, I was impressed with his commitment to quality and detail. I thought I was an okay type designer at the time, but my experience with Ken significantly raised my standards on all the fonts I’ve done since then. Unfortunately, the project languished due to other priorities at House and was eventually put on hold.

Around 2012, I decided to resume work on the script on my own. At that point, only the lowercase and a few caps had really been drawn, and I was really itching to design the rest of the caps.

In 2017, I showed Ken what I’d been up to with the script. I asked if he thought House was ever going to get the project going again, and, if not, could we amend the agreement to allow me to release it myself? Long story short, House agreed.

With the script fully in my hands, I stepped up the pace to finish it. Five years later, the result is Dreamboat.

Back when I was working on it with House, there was only a single bold weight. To provide more flexibility for designers, I expanded this to six—Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold, and Black. (Dreamboat might be the only script in its genre with such a wide weight range.)

One of the things that bug me about a lot of script typefaces is lack of a solution to situations where you need to set something in all caps, such as roman numerals or acronyms. For that I added small caps.

There is also a stylistic set which raises the cross-bar of the lowercase “t” and extends it for more of a custom look.

To top it off, Dreamboat includes three styles of tails—an element quite often used with bold scripts.

Check out the User Guide to see how it all works. Tip: Many of my vendors have type testers where you can type your own text and see how it looks. The tails work by typing one or more underscores at the end of a word. Just make sure that ligatures are enabled on the site (sometimes they are not).

I never dreamed when I started that it would take nearly 20 years to finish Dreamboat. But, to be honest, I’m glad it did because it was really beyond my skills when I first started working on it. It’s been one of the most enjoyable typefaces to design, and I’m excited to see what people will do with it.

Dreamboat is available at all the usual places for desktop, web, and other uses.

One of my recent lettering jobs was this one for the cover of Elinor Lipman’s new book My Latest Grievance, due out next spring. Houghton Mifflin art director Martha Kennedy wanted something spirited with a handwriting feel. I’m happy with the way it turned out. I’m always a little surprised that I can do this style at all. My actual handwriting is pretty erratic. I know people who can write like this. There must be something about the way their hands work that I just don’t have. Luckily, if I know how I want it to look and take my time, with a little assist from computer technology, I can pull it off. I take heart in the fact that the great lettering artists of the past would have been lost without their photostat cameras and razor blades. These things are never as easy as they look.

A year or two ago I lettered a logo for a company called Mobile Fidelity — MoFi for short. They do high-end recordings for audiophiles. I got a tip from the designer whom I worked with on the job that MoFi was featured in a recent American Express ad, and that the logo shows up near the end of the ad. Here’s a better look at the logo:

(Thanks to David Collins for the tip.)

Last year, I did a logo design for Not Coming to A Theater Near You, a website devoted to movies off the beaten path. The designer, Rumsey Taylor, who was redoing the look of the entire site, wanted the logo to look like a title card from a film noire feature. What I came up with is based mainly on the title card from “Mr. Arkadin” (1955).

In spite of appearances, I don’t usually use an actual brush in my lettering designs, but in this case I did. The final art is vector-based, but I worked out the construction of the letters with brush and ink. (I’m not skilled enough at brush lettering to do the final art that way.)

The image above is a “treatment” I did to make it look like an actual title card from an old film, sort of a “serving suggestion.” On the wesite, Rumsey chose a simpler approach. The site redesign looks great, and I was happy to see that he’s using Metallophile Sp8 as a webfont (via Typekit).