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Just a note to say, this Friday afternoon, I’ll be pitting my type chops against (with?) fellow type designer Peter Bruhn for a “exhibition” game of Layer Tennis. I expect this to be a friendly match, more improvisational than competitive. But we’ll see.

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.)

This was a fun one. Rumsey Taylor of Not Coming to a Theater Near You asked me to create lettering for a splash page graphic for the site’s fourth annual horror film festival.

The idea was to emulate classic horror film title screens. Thanks to Steven Hill’s Movie Title Screens Page I was able to find loads of reference. At first I was thinking I would use some kind of blackletter style, but it turns out almost no horror films use that style, unless they involve Dracula or Frankenstein. (More often it’s used for pirate movies.)

In the end I decided to go with the classic scrawled-in-blood look. To get the effect, I wrote out the letters freehand using a Wacom Cintiq and Corel Painter. It took a lot of experimentation and “takes” to get the right look. Once I had the basic lettering, I enhanced it in Illustrator and Photoshop to get the look of an old black and white movie title, complete with light-spill on the brightest areas.

Okay, so I admit it. I bought an iPhone about three hours after they went on sale a month ago. I didn’t have to wait in line or anything. I walked in, bought it, and walked out. Like nearly everyone else who has one, I’m very happy with it.

So, I was a bit tickled today when I unexpectedly saw some of my recent work on it: the new PopCap Games logo, which appears on Bejeweled, the first game designed specifically for the iPhone.

I did the job last spring. Here is a comparison of the old version and the new version:

The idea was to make the logo cleaner and smarter without making it noticeably different to PopCap’s customers. Except for the background emblem, practically every detail of the lettering was changed. It would have been fun to completely redo it, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

If you have an iPhone and want to play Bejeweled, fire up Safari and head over the PopCap website. The game will automatically load when you visit the site using an iPhone.

Here’s a fun lettering job I did for the cover of “Two for the Road” by Jane & Michael Stern. The book is a bunch of recipes collected from roadside diners all over the U.S. Art director Martha Kennedy asked me to make the lettering look like something you might see on a sign for a diner. In fact, it’s somewhat based on the sign from a famous diner called Rosie’s.

(This work is actually not that recent, but just I realized that I never posted anything about it here when the book was published last year.)

Earlier this year, I completed a lettering assignment for the cover of “Stewardess,” a book by Chronicle Books, which was just published. Designer Ben Shaykin came up with the idea of doing a take off (!) on the old Skyway Luggage logo.

It can be tricky to get things like this to work if you don’t have the right letters, or too many or few letters. It can also be tricky to come up with the letters that didn’t exist in the original logo. In this case, the style was a straightforward script. It would be conceivable to base an entire font on this style, which is not always the case with logos.

I’m happy with the way it turned out. The book itself is a lot of fun to look at (it’s mostly a picture book) and is getting positive reviews.