chris willmore

#fontober day 26: playful, round, and bottom-heavy. the 'o' makes me think of a hard-boiled egg

#fontober day 25: finished yesterday's calligraphy face, inspired by the bold letters on Library of America book covers. diagonal strokes like in s/v/w written with a calligraphy pen are naturally thicker than verticals so you have to compensate in the font editor so they don't look too dark

#fontober day 24: headed to a wedding today so i've only got part of an alphabet, but i like where it's headed. a wedding's a great excuse to get the calligraphy pens out!

#fontober day 23: building out the geometric sans some more, this time adding an uppercase to the regular weight

#fontober day 22: another typecooker: hairline, no curves, extra condensed. this feels like something i might have seen in WIRED magazine in the '90s

#fontober day 21: finished the 15th century script from yesterday. it's surprisingly readable, or maybe that's just how it looks after i've been staring at it all day?

#fontober day 20: i'm feeling a little under the weather so here's a half-alphabet based on an inscription from 1489 i saw in the burgos cathedral in spain. will finish tomorrow — looking forward to drawing that 'g'!

#fontober day 19: a bold version of the geometric sans from day 14 that interpolates with it. the difference is less impressive than i'd hoped because 'a' and 'e' put a limit on how thick you can make the strokes without the counters closing up

#fontober day 18: a typecooker-inspired oblique bodoni-esque thing. i like the sail-shaped counter on the 'e' that i ended up with, though i couldn't quite fit it into any of the other letters

#fontober day 17: had a busy day non-font-wise so i just drew caps for the font from day 2. i thought it was easy until i got to M/N/W and then i regretted my life choices

#fontober day 16 (halfway!): the lorenzo theatre in san lorenzo turned on its neon sign for the first time in 44 years yesterday and i fell in love with its boxy letters. that 'n' is wild, right? thanks to u/JonaFrey on reddit for the photo

#fontober day 15: did a little revival of the typeface in one of the old books i didn't end up using in type west, "the critic in the occident" by george hamlin fitch (elder & co., sf, 1913). i think it's a caslon of some variety

#fontober day 14: a geometric sans i drew with mouse and keyboard on the train because i forgot my sketch pad. you have to pull all kinds of tricks to make a monolinear sans face look even: taper the joins in abdhmnpq, thin the strokes overall in busier characters like aes, etc. it's tough!

#fontober day 13: a somewhat high-waisted uppercase to complement the lowercase from day 1. feels kinda '50s-esque?

#fontober day 12: added a loopy cursive-based uppercase to the ultrawide monolinear italic from day 7. drawing cursive caps is definitely type-2 fun — it was a pain while i was doing it but looking at it now it's kinda nice (if quirky)

#fontober day 11: latin caps letters have horizontal strokes at the top, middle, and bottom. if you tilt the letters upwards, the bottom stroke on the first letter lines up with the middle stroke on the second, and likewise the middle and top strokes, and you get these long strokes thru EAK and CAR

#fontober day 10: digitized and expanded a hand-painted laundromat sign by 14th and south van ness in san francisco. it's interesting to compare this with fontober 24 from 2023 — this one is sillier for sure

#fontober day 9: a weird little western-style reverse contrast face with big stompy feet, inspired by a sign i saw on haight st.

#fontober day 8: i'm fascinated by the shirorekha, the horizontal stroke that runs along the top of devanagari characters. what if the latin script had one on the baseline? here's one approach, with some opentype magic for initial/final alternates

#fontober day 7: doodled an ultrawide monolinear italic inspired by the amazing @neondeutschland.bsky.social

#fontober day 6: another typecooker, this one saying "capitals, no contrast, serifs," which is a bit of a challenge — serifs and contrast usually go hand in hand (with the exception of slab serifs like memphis). i chose to add thin bracketed serifs but everything else is roughly the same thickness

#fontober day 5: i love the letters on this sign i saw on the way from triacastela to samos on the camino de santiago — the square loops on the D/P/R, the slightly wild S

#fontober day 4: drew a rounded typewriter face, a sort of "courier from memory." how do you make it so traditionally narrow letters like i/l/r/s/t and wide letters like m/w feel at ease with each other? long serifs and subtle change in stroke thickness help a little but ultimately it's vibes

#fontober day 3: a calligraphic italic with ball terminals and strokes that taper in the middle? sure, typecooker, why not. i struggled a bit with this one but i think it hangs together. maybe good for a book cover

#fontober day 2: what if eurostile and impact had a baby? it might look something like this. slightly off-kilter ultra bold squareness for your next spaceship

omg it's #fontober already! every year during the month of october i make one font (well, one alphabet plus some punctuation) a day. good practice for quick drawing. here's my first font, based on a typecooker, a sort of narrow scotchy face with silly proportions in the a, e, and s

life imitates @theonion.com www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mM...

one week til fontober!!

Optimist: the cup is half full Pessimist: the cup is half empty Type designer: the space within the cup matches the space between cups

Today marks 50 years since the world premiere of Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich on April 24, 1976, at New York’s Town Hall, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians.

the design of everyday things (1988)

oh hey it’s me letterformarchive.org/news/type-we...

The Monday Period: Pages 1-4 #garfield #imsorryjon

huge congrats to the @letterformarchive.org type west class of 2025! a feast of creative type design typewest.letterformarchive.org/2025/

Happy belated birthday to the best character in Mahjong Soul, who is allowed to eat as many tiles as he wants

My sincere wish for all of us in 2026 is we all keep makin' art! Good, bad, stinky – it doesn't matter! Let's keep making things. ✏️💨

ambient maria is live now to 9 pm pacific with a special holiday sunday sundowns! tune in twitch.tv/theambientma...

Pokemon is basically a thing Nintendo does where once every couple of years they release a new set of character designs and I get to enjoy cute fanart based on these character designs for the next two years. Allegedly, a video game is somehow involved somewhere

Legends 🌟 #nightinthewoods x #animalcrossing

we're so back. youtu.be/aDl3cwrpz_U?...

all the A's i drew for #fontober 2025 (and an accurate representation of my mental state afterwards lol). which one was your favorite? big thanks to everyone who followed along and provided feedback and encouragement ❤️ let's do it again next year!

#fontober day 30: the redlick-newman building by 17th and mission in SF (the one that used to have the "17 reasons why!" sign on top) has these blocky geometric letters embedded in the sidewalk out front. i had to fontify them. why is the original N so narrow tho? did they forget about the hyphen?

#fontober day 29: my handwriting tends to take a zig-zag form for letters like i/m/n/u (good thing no one else has to read it!) so i made an irregular monolinear italic with a zig-zag rhythm. i was tempted to make 'n' and 'u' identical but i'm not that mean — how would you tell "month" from "mouth"?