for fonts. My folks bought me a computer in the early ’80s and I made some bitmap fonts, mostly knockoffs of Letraset fonts. Letraset was the most popular brand of dry transfer lettering… these plastic sheets that you’d rub down to transfer letters onto a surface. The catalogs came out once a year, they were free at art supply stores. I was just crazy about those Letraset catalogs, still am. In spite of your love of type, you embarked on a career in animation and video games. Was that your other big fascination at the time? When I was sixteen I worked on Alien Fires, a game that nobody remembers. But it made me confident that I could work in games. And you know… explosions are fun to make. In high school, I asked my layout teacher (it was an art/high school) about the prospects of designing fonts for a living. This was in the late ’80s, before digital design really took off as a career path. She told me I could become a typographer or submit designs to Letraset and maybe they’d accept it… but I probably wouldn’t be able to live off that. Back in those days the number of fonts released in a year was about the same as what gets released at MyFonts in a week today. It just wasn’t a practical career path in 1988. I wanted to get into computer graphics and the particular college I was interested in required 3 years of animation training. I graduated at the beginning of the 1990s recession at a time when more and more animation work got outsourced to Korea. I did a lot of watercolor painting to pay the bills and I made free video games for fun. That got me a job in video games and the fonts were put aside for a few more years. I really enjoyed working on games. You had these really tight technical restrictions to deal with; I like being forced to innovate. Saving a kilobyte in those days felt like a major victory.
▲ One of Larabie’s very many promotional pieces – this time for Enamel and Fenwick
Meloriac ▲ Meloriac is a straightforward Ultra Black all-caps face – until you use the E (and who doesn’t?). Then it suddenly becomes something special: a streetwise, unicase display font. Says Ray: “My goal with Meloriac was a dry geometric sans. With a geometrical font, if you try to make it neutral and balanced you’re always going to end up looking like Avant Garde or Futura... that’s just the way it goes unless you give it a definite flavor. But I wanted it to be neutral. Heavy and neutral. So you get this kind of comfortable fami liarity but just not the way you remember it.” Meloriac is ideal for tight headlines and logos. Check out the trendy J-pop Katakana letters.
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