Girls are Weird

The fol­low­ing comes from an email inter­view I had with John Martz of Robotjohnny.com for my Typog­ra­phy course.

Around 1997, Cana­dian graphic and font designer John Martz decided to design a type­face which would be inspired, in part, by his child­hood and his bewil­der­ment with the oppo­site sex. Accord­ing to Martz;

It shares its inspi­ra­tion with a lot of my work, which is the stuff I grew up on as a kid — Hanna Bar­bera car­toons, lit­tle Golden books [and] Looney Tunes. A fun, almost retro style.

The font would be called Girls are Weird and lit­tle did Martz know that for the next 7–8 years it would become one of the more pop­u­lar free fonts dis­trib­uted on the Inter­net due to an unusual and refresh­ing usage agree­ment; that is, if the font is used for com­mer­cial pur­poses all that Martz asks for in return is a pur­chase from his Amazon.com wishlist.

Girls are Weird is a curly-q font made purely for dec­o­ra­tive or dis­play pur­poses with a rel­a­tively large x-height. When Martz was design­ing Girls are Weird he men­tioned that he never thought about its intended use, instead focus­ing on the fact that he was just moved by the fun of cre­at­ing it. On that note he also acknowl­edges the fact that the font itself wasn’t dif­fi­cult to create;

I cre­ated it almost 10 years ago before hav­ing any for­mal design edu­ca­tion or real grasp of the soft­ware, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I’m both pleased and sur­prised that it’s still kick­ing about.

In the cre­ative process, Martz explained that he first starts with sketches. From there, once he’s pleased with a sketch, he’ll then scan the draw­ings into the com­puter and work in Illus­tra­tor to con­struct the font visu­ally. Like any­thing, his ini­tial attempts at font cre­ation used more arbi­trary methods;

My first exper­i­ments in cre­at­ing fonts [were] done in stone-age ver­sions of Corel­Draw, which had an option to export draw­ings into .ttf files with very lit­tle con­trol over any­thing. I soon grad­u­ated to a com­bi­na­tion of Illus­tra­tor for draw­ing and Fontog­ra­pher for the con­struc­tion and out­put of the font. I now use font­lab because of its com­pat­i­bil­ity with OS X.

Since Girls are Weird is fea­tured on a mul­ti­tude of free font sites it’s not sur­pris­ing that the font itself has been seen in the wild. Martz has seen it used on toys, games, books, comic books, CDs, store­fronts, sig­nage and even on Television.

In regards to offer­ing his fonts for free online and his Amazon.com share­ware model, Martz explains that the only real issue he’s run into is when peo­ple don’t abide by the rules;

… part of the prob­lem that the Inter­net presents is that peo­ple love free stuff, so my fonts get passed around and they show up on free font web­sites and CD-ROMs often with­out the orig­i­nal copy­right infor­ma­tion, so it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to police. I know that every time I see one of my fonts out in the wild that often­times it’s by some­one who didn’t pay for the font, but I ulti­mately can’t com­plain because it’s still excit­ing to see my work in the wild and I can’t guar­an­tee that it was my own site that the font came from.

Despite this issue, Martz has been impressed by those who do abide by the share­ware model; “the hon­est and good nature of peo­ple con­tin­ues to impress me, and I get sev­eral things pur­chased from my wish list every month, so even if I feel I’m get­ting ripped off by the peo­ple who don’t read my copy­right info, there are still a good bunch of peo­ple out there who do and they keep my book­shelf stocked!”.

Finally, Martz offers a piece of advice for cur­rent and bud­ding graphic and font designers;

Detail. Don’t skimp on the details. Good design is made by peo­ple who pay atten­tion to the lit­tle things, whether it be kern­ing, mea­sure­ments, colour, etc. Iron­i­cally, its advice I wish I was given when I cre­ated these fonts, some of them in high school, because I feel they’d have a longer shelf life, but I’m still happy Girls are Weird is still popular.