Now I do my drawing in a proper font editor, a much better way to work if you’re serious about making fonts.) (Note: I wouldn’t recommend designing fonts in Illustrator. After the basic character set was finished in Illustrator, I moved everything into Fontographer to do the spacing and kerning, and generated the finished fonts in early June. In all, it took about two weeks to do the drawings. Instead, I used the blend tool in Illustrator to create drawings that were exactly halfway between the two existing weights. Once I had that, I expanded the line to an outlined shape and cleaned it up, fixing all the little optical issues and stroke endings, and adjusting the height of the characters to match the bold weight.įor the regular weight, no drawings were necessary. Using the bold weight as a template, I drew a simple line through the middle of each stroke. For this weight, I used a different method. Once I finished drawing the bold weight, I moved on to the light weight. I was surprised at how well this worked, and I’ve worked this way ever since. And I tried not to be too rigid with measuring every little thing, trusting my eye instead. I was also careful not to rely too much on the circle tool, the mistake I’d made in my earlier failed attempt. The sketches were fairly small, preventing the kind of distortions that can happen when working so large on a computer monitor. I used the sketch as a reminder of what I was thinking, not something to be traced blindly. The next step was to scan the sketch and bring it into Illustrator. They were more like notes to myself than working drawings. The idea was to get the general idea down, with the right look and proportions. I also didn’t attempt to make the drawings super precise. I’d found that working too big can lead to letter designs that don’t work as well when they are set smaller. Part of my strategy was to make the drawings fairly small-about a half inch tall, close to a size they might be used. I started sketching the boldest weight on velum in pencil. By this time, I knew exactly how I wanted it to look. In March 2001, I decided to start fresh and try a different approach. After finishing and releasing some fonts I’d been working on during the ’90s- Refrigerator, Sharktooth, Blakely, and Felt Tip Senior-I knew I had to get going again on Ruby Script. I left Rivertown in 2000 to start my own design business, Mark Simonson Studio, and put up a website. You can see further development of the idea in the lettering for the “Font Sales” icon I designed for the site (above). I wanted to start making fonts again. But I made it too stiff and mechanical and failed to capture the spirit of the design. Working in Adobe illustrator, I built it from simple geometric shapes. I decided to call it Ruby Script, after my daughter, since they were both born around the same time. In 1995, I made an attempt to turn it into a font. With a full-time job and all these other things going on in my life, Deco Script, as I called it at the time, got put on the shelf. Plus, my daughter Ruby was born that fall. But I had other commitments: I was trying to finish my earliest font releases for Font Haus, Proxima Sans and Kandal. Pretty quickly I had the basic design worked out. I continued to be preoccupied with the idea. I did only the characters you can see here. The script idea was still on my mind and I decided to use it. Something about it caught my imagination, and I started making sketches of it in idle moments.Īround this time, I was asked to design a product-a pillow displaying the words “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways” (I know, very corny). It was a bit like a cross between Typo Upright and Kabel. The old Rolleiflex logo and similar things were probably in the back of my mind. One of the unused logos I did was in a script style, a sort of mid-century European look, like a logo you might see on a vintage camera or radio.
For the logo, I created a narrow art deco-inspired sans serif that would eventually become one of my other fonts, Blakely. The cover on the right, art directed by Carla Scholz, shows how the redesign turned out. In late 1993, I was assigned to redesign the Signals catalog. Sometimes I got involved in catalog design. My job was designing products like t-shirts, mugs, umbrellas and stuff, and designing boxes for audio cassettes and videotapes, which were sold in these catalogs. Rivertown published mail order catalogs, including Wireless (“for fans of public radio”) and Signals (“for fans of public television”). During the nineties, I worked at Rivertown Trading Company, sister company of Minnesota Public Radio.
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