By Chris Risdon
There are a lot of ways to get inspiration as a type designer. You can make a type design completely from scratch. You can take an historical typeface from the days of yore (i.e. pre-digital age) and bring it into the 21st century with some new touches. Or you can be inspired by your surroundings, pulling in from such things as graffiti and hand-painted signs. It was that last example which lead me to design SAV Display – a typeface inspired by the local signage of Savannah, GA.
When I started to study the hand painted signage around the city, I tried to learn more about the sign painters responsible. I had a friend, Rebecca Boehm Carr, who was doing research into the actual letterers as part of her thesis project while attending SCAD. She had learned that there were three painters around town who were responsible for the 2 or 3 styles that were found as signs for local merchants. Some of the sign painters were originators, others copied the style, but at lower costs. Altogther, they used what were somewhat traditional typefaces, and created a slightly organic, interesting version of this. A keen eye could start to recognize who painted what, but overall they created a distinct visual style for the signage of local merchants. I thought this could make a very interesting typeface.
I started cataloging the signs around town. Auto shops, furniture stores, barber shops and restaurants were just some of the types of businesses that had this local lettering.
After an inventory of letters from all the pictures I took around town, I had cataloged examples of about 18 of the 26 uppercase letters. There were no lowercase letters, so I would need to interpret what these would look like, based on the lettering style of the uppercase letters (as well as interpret the missing 8 uppercase letters). This was actually a nice opportunity to bring more of my own design into the typeface.
After lots of sketching, plus the digital work in the computer, I had about 250 unique characters (also called glyphs). Why so many? Well, when you sell a license to a font in the retail marketplace, you don’t know how someone might use your font. Besides the letters, you need punctuation, numbers and symbols. All told, there’s at least 250 characters‚ with the possibility of more if you foresee an even wider range of uses.
In the end, I was happy with how SAV Display came out, it captured the aesthetic and spirit of the unique hand-lettered signs seen around Savannah, pulled from authentic lettering while also using some of my own design interpretation. Design inspiration is all around you, and it’s just a matter of knowing what to do with it.
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Chris Risdon is an interaction design by day and a type designer by night. He’s a lead experience designer for Adaptive Path in Austin, TX, as well as an adjunct professor at Austin Community College. SAV Display and others were a part of Chris’ MFA thesis in Graphic Design at SCAD. His retail fonts can be found on fonts.com, T26, and myfonts.com.