To prepare for the next version of kartooner.com I’ve been doing a few sketches to get the creative juices flowing. This sketch in particular, which I’ve entitled “School Office” just came to me last night after watching an episode of CSI where a spikey-haired blonde kid accidentally stuffed his best friend into a commercial washer.

I’m not sure how that was the basis for inspiration, but it was.

A little bit of time, patience, imagination and a copy of Photoshop CS2 creates playful results like this. At the time I believe I was channeling East L.A. (Cheech Marin would be proud).

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.

One of the most important pieces of the kartooner redesign is the addition of a medievil crest. A few people have emailed me about the crest image which serves as part of the kartooner.com logo and instead of emailing everyone individually with the same answer I’ve decided to explain how the crest came to be and what it means to me as an artist and visionary.

For starters, Wikipedia defines a crest as being:

[...] a component of a coat of arms. It is a figure (or group of figures), often but not always a beast of some kind, depicted atop the helmet placed above the shield. The crest has been traditionally used by men only, with the exception of queens of England or Britain, who have been treated heraldically as men. Some armigers used their crest as a personal badge, which led to the erroneous use of the word “crest” to describe a shield or full coat of arms.

The crest adorning the header of this site was inspired in part by a crest I had seen on a cover of an old book. The original images on the cover were simple pictographs resembling medieval scenery, including an image of a joust and a plate full of grapes. When I began the initial sketch, I decided to use four components that make up the core of my creativity and these include:

Truthfully I could have gone a lot deeper as far as the imagery is concerned, but my goal was to keep it simple and allow the image to convey itself without complicated explanation. Furthermore, my imagination combined with pencils, paper and ink allow for unlimited exploration and creation. Inspiration is everywhere you look and for me, no matter where I am or what I’m focusing on it’s just a matter of pulling out my sketchpad and capturing that moment on paper.