10 years!

Gimlet 10 intro

So, today marks 10 years since I launched my type foundry, which coincided with the release of my font Gimlet.

I’m not great commemorating things like this (or introspection about my process in general 😅), but it did feel worth mentioning. It’s difficult to overstate how grateful I am to the folks at Font Bureau who encouraged and supported me as I took the leap back in 2016, and to the customers, club members, friends, mentors, and font lovers who have made it possible for me to make the fonts that I want to make ever since.

Gimlet 10 display

Most of my early fonts were “synthesis fonts” that blended different influences within a genre, but Gimlet was my first type design to be in direct conversation with a single source: Georg Trump’s Schadow.

Nick Sherman was the person who first urged me to tackle Schadow, and he and Indra Kupferschmid acted as my guides as I unpacked the multifaceted design and reimagined it as a contemporary quirkhorse.

Gimlet 10 text

While display type has trended towards “more attitude” over the past 10 years, I feel like text typography has actually moved in the opposite direction.

Gimlet makes the argument for a judicious helping of attitude across the board, from text to display. It’s something I’d love to see more of in contemporary type palettes.

Gimlet is not one of my most-used text faces, but it remains one of the families I am most proud of.