I was searching for just the right font to complete a contract job I had for a production project. Looking for font is a little like getting a box of animal crackers; it can't possibly hurt to have just one more. In the digital eating disorders of life, I was out of control.

I was on a two-day binge of font collecting, trying to find at least 8 or 10 that filled a list of requirements and would give my art director a hefty lot to choose from. (Of course, he picked an entirely different one anyway, LOL). In the process of looking, I found that I was inspired by the selections. I saw projects I hadn't even been hired for open before my eyes, party invitations I suddenly had to throw parties for, political campaigns I needed to run. I almost designed a series of greeting cards.

Whoa, girl, Get a grip. How was this happening, and when did I become the new Hallmark? Well, maybe not Hallmark. You haven't seen my cards. But, how was I becoming so inspired by mere letters, and who was this Larabie guy that kept popping up?

After going through several sites, I began to realize there is a definite Larabie pattern. One, I tended to gravitate to his fonts the most. They carry a great attitude while remaining readable, two main things I look for. Two, I am apparently not alone in appreciating his skills. His work is everywhere. You will be hard pressed to visit a larger site that doesn't carry his stuff, or many of the smaller sites, for that matter. He has transitioned from being a game artist with such companies as Rockstar/Take 2 to being a well recognized font designer. He is very happy with his choice. I am too.

Since so many fonts fall into the freeware genre, it seemed only right I send him an email of praise and thanks. And, that I suck him into doing an interview for me.

Hey, I can't help it. It's part of my 12-step font program.

  Give a little background on your career path:

I started loving fonts in 1973 when my grandmother gave me font catalogues and stacks of partially used Letraset sheets. When I got my first computer in the eighties I made a few bitmap fonts for the TRS-80 CoCo and the Amiga. I worked on a game called Alien Fires back in 1986 and decided I wanted to become an animator. I graduated Sheridan College's Classical Animation program and found work in videogames a couple of years later. In 1996, I got back into making fonts and have been creating them ever since. Now I create custom fonts for clients, new freeware and commercial fonts occasionally. Most of my time is spent on the technical details and dealing with clients.

  What made you switch from gaming to Type Designer?

The videogame industry was the wrong career path for me. The industry is very immature, disorganized & wasteful - creativity is unwelcome. Most of the products are stupid, violent or both.

  If so many of your fonts are freeware, how do you support yourself? Do your paying commissions cover your expenses enough, and the rest is done just for the love of the craft?

I make most of my money from donations and font sales off Typodermic. It's enough to cover expenses. Extra cash comes from doing custom fonts and licensing my fonts for distribution with software. My wfe does the admin side of the business and she’s also given me hours of copy writing and ad production.

  When you were in the gaming industry, what was your line of work?

I was an art director. Early on I was in the trenches doing the bare metal pixels stuff but later the company got bigger and he hired more artists to keep up. It used to be that you could do a game with two or three artists but now you need twenty, at least. My favorite part of the job was doing the more technical work like figuring out how to convert palettes on thousands of texture files and creating textures in limited memory. The older games had more technical limitations so it was fun. I really enjoyed working on ports. That's where you take a game design for a particular platform and redo it so it works on another. For example: on a PC game you don't really have to worry about memory. If you run out the game will just cache on the hard drive and it'll slow down a bit. On a Playstation 2, the game just won't fit. On a PC you can have a game that downgrades automatically based on the users' graphic card. So, if a player has a cheap graphic card, the game will look like crap and it's nobody's fault. On the PS2, it's the same for everyone so you have to be extremely conservative with resources. A PS2 has, roughly, the power or a Pentium 300 with a 4 meg graphics card. Designing a PS2 game now is like designing a PC game in 1998 - except with much less RAM and no hard drive. In one case the PC version of a game used about 64X more resources than we had available on the PS2. That kind of challenge was what I enjoyed the most.

  Do you ever combine those skills?

I never used my fonts in any of the games I was working on but I have licensed them to other game companies. When I create graphics I like to crush every wasted byte out of the gifs.

  What software do you like to use?

I use FontLab to create all my fonts. Before 2000 I used Fontographer.

  What do you consider to be your perfect working conditions?

I like to work indoors on a notebook with loud music playing. I collect ridiculous amounts of music in almost all musical styles.

  What have been your projects to date?

For the last few months, I've been updating all my commercial and freeware fonts. For some fonts, I can clean up and update in a matter of minutes, while others can take a week. Blue Highway took about two full weeks to clean up. Apart from ongoing commercial projects, I have a few more projects in various states of development, including a new freeware font called Xirod which was commissioned by a corporate client, a pair of fonts based on silent film inter-titles, a 1900-style lineale, a stencil font based on the air cleaner of a 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda and a font for creating onscreen menus on video.

  In what industry do you find your fonts are used the most?

I think people use them a lot on posters for lost pets. They seem to appear on clothing more than anything.

  What would be a dream project for you?

Just making fonts full-time is my dream project. Having one of my fonts included with Windows would be pretty cool.

  Do you have any favorite designers?

Morris Fuller Benton, Ed Benguait, Nick Shinn, James Arboghast.

  What makes a good font?

Testing and revision. Bad fonts can become good fonts with more testing and revision.

  What font trends do you see developing in the industry?

The next retro trend in fonts will be nineteenth century lineales and 1960's casual interlocking fonts made possible by two factors: House Industries acquisition of the Photo Lettering Inc. back catalogue and OpenType making unlimited numbers of ligatures easy for end-users to deal with. This type of lettering disappeared when desktop publishing put photo lettering in it's grave. If you're not familiar with these, picture hippy lettering where letters interlock with each other in funky ways.

  How do you select the best fonts for the job?

There is a definite fashion cycle in fonts, the fonts you use say as much about you as the clothes you wear. Using Arial for body copy, headlines and titles is akin to wearing matching denim Keds, jeans, denim shirt, denim jacket and denim ball cap. This type of person likes everything to match but has no sense of style. They’re afraid to mix other fonts because they’re afraid or they couldn’t be bothered. Perhaps they have poor taste and think it really looks sharp. There’s nothing wrong with Arial or Helvetica the same way there’s nothing wrong with wearing denim – you just have to do it with style.

If fonts are clothing then people need to clean out their wardrobe once in a while. I’m not talking about the classics like Futura or Garamond, I’m, talking about really old, overexposed dated freeware fonts or fonts that everyone got free with Corel Draw back in the early nineties. Late eighties trendy fonts like Industria will probably come back into fashion someday, but hold on to them until then.

Using obscure, hard-to-find new and interesting fonts tells the world that you’re with-it. Mix that with some good taste and a long look in the mirror and you’ll make a great impression. Just like in the world of garments, you can go too far with the latest runway fashion and end up looking like a fashion victim. In other words, there are a lot of new, avant-garde interesting fonts out here but make sure people can still read them. If you want some really helpful pointers for learning the basics of choosing fonts and graphic design in general, I recommend a book called "The Non Designer’s Design Book" which does a great job of teaching the basics in everyday language. It’s a quick read with lots of examples to set you on the right path. Your website/print ads might be walking the streets in the font equivalent of Cherokee jeans, a B.U.M. Equipment sweatshirt, a Members Only jacket, silk top hat and pink jellies with sparkles – or even worse – jogging pants and an oversized Tweety Bird t-shirt!

  Are there any fonts you hate?

I don't hate any fonts but I hate to see fonts used inappropriately. I don't hate Arial but I hate driving through a town where all the street names are printed in Arial, squashed and stretched to varying degrees. I think Comic Sans looks fine on a web site for children but I hate to see it on a sign for a sports bar. I know not to hate anything anymore. I used to hate Hall & Oates but one day I woke up and I loved Hall & Oates. In other words, what you hate now, you may love in a different context.

  What are some common mistakes that new font designers make?

Most new designers are guilty of extreme modularity. They make their fonts by recycling parts but they don't make visual adjustments. For example: a lowercase n is the same as a lowercase u, right? Wrong: the u will appear to be wider than the n because of an optical illusion. Trust what your eyes see, not what the measurement in your font software tells you.

  Are there any anecdotes, inspirations, or advice you would like to offer?

Stay away from the videogame industry and eat your greens.

To learn more about Ray Larabie, please:

visit www.typodermic.com

~OR~ www.larabiefonts.com

Copyright Firewalk Digital, Renee Dunlop All rights reserved worldwide

(Back to The MatchBox)

(Back to Front Page)