LETTERING

Here’s some background for this lifelong interest of mine. You can also view some of my completed projects as well.

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I’ve been fascinated by the visual appearance of letters, numbers, and symbols for as long as I can remember. According to my mom, my favorite childhood toy was a pencil, and I practiced printing letters of the alphabet often. Some of my early drawings even included letters with serifs.

Handwritten alphabet (1979)

Starting in second grade, I began to learn cursive penmanship using the Palmer Method. I loved making signs with stencils and carefully labeled my Maxell mix tapes using Letraset dry transfer sheets that I discovered at a local stationery store.

A major turning point arrived when I received a Sheaffer calligraphy set as a Christmas gift in 1983, when I was nine years old. As I became skilled at different styles of calligraphy, my work was eventually featured in my grade school yearbook (The Aloysian), my high school newspaper (The Green Arch), and my high school’s annual literary and fine arts magazine (Tapestry).

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My interest in lettering later expanded into digital fonts and typography. About 20 years ago, when I worked as a developer at a web design agency in Philadelphia, I learned about the finer details of layout, copyediting, and special characters. By now, I’m able to identify most typefaces by sight — I can simply look at a billboard or a bumper sticker and tell you whether the text is set in Garamond, Gill Sans, or Gotham. Two of my favorite typefaces are featured on this site, and the colophon page has the details.

It’s been a while since I’ve devoted time to pen-and-paper projects, so I’m excited to return to that mode of working. If you have an idea for a project that calls for custom lettering, feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to chat with you.