Research

Geoff Mcfetridge

Geoff Mcfetridge is a Californian based graphic designer who is skilled in many media from film to textiles to 3d visuals. He began doing small works with local artists and eventually began touring with his Beautiful Losers Exhibition around the world gaining the interest of many graphic designers.More recently in his career he’s begun doing work for large corporations such as Nike, MTV and Pepsi.

In 2009 he was asked to create a typeface for the upcoming film adaption of Where the Wild Things Are.He along with Mojo designs were told to create a unique font that reflect the playful nature of the film as well as distinguish it from the book which type face was greatly out dated.“It was meant to look like the writing of the lead child actor, and the studio responded very positively to the lettering”. After digitising the font they found that they lost the handwritten appearance and had to create an entirely separate type to lose all uniformity.

The font is instantly recognisable by its drastic vertical stretch, organic shapeand awkward placement on the baseline. I love the A-symmetry on the ‘A’ and ‘W’as I find it helps push your eye from the left to right which avoiding tongue twisting as you read it. At first glance the type looks suspiciously similar to othertypefaces such as in Men in Black intro credits and Freaks and Geeks logo; although on closer inspection you can see there is a drastic difference of cap heights between the two fonts.  The Freaks and Geeks’ font is also far more grungy and appears to be etched rather than drawn.

Bright Ideas

Bright ideas has been creating display fontsfor over 5 years. Who makes the fonts remains a mystery over the internet as the typographer has no site, bio or even portfolios. However there is no denying that they have made a profound impact recently when there font Black Rose became the iconic type of the Vimeo logo. It is a contemporary display font that has obvious influences from the calligraphy style. The fonts small tracking all9ows each stroke to flow into the following character, though this doesn’t always align well (i.e. where the ‘m’ flows into the ‘e’) but usually look great. The upper case letter are unique and incorporates spontaneous flicks and strokes that catch and please the eye though I found that on some letter such as the upper case F that this was too heavily used and doesn’t fit with the uniform lower case that follow. The font has huge potential especially as its thickness allows a large range of colours to fit without effecting legibility. I would love to use this in my own work.

Maniakers Design

Maniakers Design is a Japanese company that is known mostly for their large array of light hearted comic and bubble fonts. They create both English and Japanese display types as well as graphic design and have even published two books. In 2001 one of their typographers Masayuki Sato began work on a rounded sans-serif font called Pico-Alphabet. The original font was hollow, using a thick white outline to illustrate the letters which works well with the mono-spacing. The shapes are minimalist to say the least using only essential features on each letter, for example the a has no terminal or shoulder and letters like the e and g have no cross bar. The upper case only changes the M and Y to fill the cap height with no other anatomical change. Although this font sounds bizarre it is quite aesthetically pleasing and would work great for web design as it did when Twitter used it for their logo in 2006. However twitter altered the text, giving the e a cross bar and lowering the X-height on the t’s. I thought this approach strengthened the font on this particular design as it prevented the e for being mistaken for an ‘a’.