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chris willmore

@treedub.org
215 followers 560 following 171 posts

type west '24 • treedub.org

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chris willmore @treedub.org · 9h
#fontober day 6: another typecooker, this one saying "capitals, no contrast, serifs," which is a bit of a challenge — serifs and contrast usually go hand in hand (with the exception of slab serifs like memphis). i chose to add thin bracketed serifs but everything else is roughly the same thickness
the quote "every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation" by kim stanley robinson, set in a new fontthe uppercase alphabet of a new fonta marker sketch of the word "GOATSKIN" with serifs
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 05/10/2026
#fontober day 5: i love the letters on this sign i saw on the way from triacastela to samos on the camino de santiago — the square loops on the D/P/R, the slightly wild S
the quote "returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; you have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits" by cindy ross, set in a new sans-serif fontthe alphabet and some punctuation, set in a new sans-serif fonta road sign in spain, with the town names MANDE / COBALLO / SAMPAIO / REIGOSA / ABRADELO, set in a sans-serif font
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 04/10/2026
#fontober day 4: drew a rounded typewriter face, a sort of "courier from memory." how do you make it so traditionally narrow letters like i/l/r/s/t and wide letters like m/w feel at ease with each other? long serifs and subtle change in stroke thickness help a little but ultimately it's vibes
the quote "you take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours" by italo calvino, set in a new typewriter fontthe alphabet in a new typewriter fontmarker sketches for the letters in a new typewriter font
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 03/10/2026
#fontober day 3: a calligraphic italic with ball terminals and strokes that taper in the middle? sure, typecooker, why not. i struggled a bit with this one but i think it hangs together. maybe good for a book cover
the quote "conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky" by n.k. jemisin, set in a new fontthe alphabet of a new italic fonta marker sketch showing the development of a new italic font
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 02/10/2026
#fontober day 2: what if eurostile and impact had a baby? it might look something like this. slightly off-kilter ultra bold squareness for your next spaceship
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 01/10/2026
omg it's #fontober already! every year during the month of october i make one font (well, one alphabet plus some punctuation) a day. good practice for quick drawing. here's my first font, based on a typecooker, a sort of narrow scotchy face with silly proportions in the a, e, and s
the quote "books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another." by amal el-mohtar, set in a new fontthe alphabet of a new fonta marker sketch of the letters "adenos" used as the basis for a new font
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 02/11/2025
all the A's i drew for #fontober 2025 (and an accurate representation of my mental state afterwards lol). which one was your favorite? big thanks to everyone who followed along and provided feedback and encouragement ❤️ let's do it again next year!
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 31/10/2025
#fontober day 31 (LAST DAY 🎃): i had zero inspiration this morning so i just made a lowercase to complement the uppercase from yesterday. i like how i was able to reuse the weird serif from C in a/c/r/s. it feels like the headline from an old-timey railroad timetable or almanac
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 30/10/2025
#fontober day 30: the redlick-newman building by 17th and mission in SF (the one that used to have the "17 reasons why!" sign on top) has these blocky geometric letters embedded in the sidewalk out front. i had to fontify them. why is the original N so narrow tho? did they forget about the hyphen?
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 29/10/2025
#fontober day 29: my handwriting tends to take a zig-zag form for letters like i/m/n/u (good thing no one else has to read it!) so i made an irregular monolinear italic with a zig-zag rhythm. i was tempted to make 'n' and 'u' identical but i'm not that mean — how would you tell "month" from "mouth"?
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 28/10/2025
shout-out to @dtemkin.bsky.social for getting me thinking about upside-down fonts with his Language 2, in which every other line goes backwards (5/5)
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 28/10/2025
i took Times (a serif font most people are very familiar with), swapped the top and bottom serifs, flipped "symmetric" letters like s and x, and adjusted a/c/e/g to make them look better upside-down. the effect is striking IMO! (4/5)
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 28/10/2025
#fontober day 28: the font in the first image is plain old Times, just upside down, right? now look at the second image where i turn it right side up. wtf!! (1/5)
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 27/10/2025
#fontober day 27: finished the ink traps experiment from yesterday. the traps force some tough decisions — the R has one corner in the crotch because having two traps that close together is too complex. i wish i had more control over which direction they pointed so R/X could look a little less wonky
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 26/10/2025
#fontober day 26: does it count as a whole alphabet if i draw half of an alphabet in two masters? i think so lol. here i'm using @glyphsapp.com corner components to add variable ink traps to a bold italic sans. i like how the S looks like a slug. gonna try to finish this one tomorrow
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 26/10/2025
#fontober day 25: designed a narrow lowercase sans with some contrast for the 16-pixel-tall displays over the doors at the ends of the BART car (see image 3). pixel fonts are so hard — there are only a few slopes that look good on a pixel grid so making a satisfactory k/v/w/x/y/z is near impossible
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 24/10/2025
#fontober day 24: i adore super-high-contrast expansion faces like bodoni black so here's my love letter(s) to them — big ol' ball terminals, hairline serifs, all the f-ligatures. good for book covers and headlines
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 23/10/2025
#fontober day 23: finished the engraver's script from yesterday (for now anyway). uppercase script is hard, but surprisingly modular —  spot the shared elements between B/K/R, T/F, A/C/E/G, O/V/W, G/J/Y, Q/Z. surprisingly O and Q have completely separate designs due to the direction they're drawn in
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 22/10/2025
#fontober day 22: @warriorchicken.me requested a font related to "brass music and trumpets" for her bday so i thought of the way the trumpet maker's name is engraved on the bell sometimes, all ornate and swooshy. might finish this one tomorrow. thanks to lttrink.com for the assist with the strokes!
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 21/10/2025
#fontober day 21: this font's based on the lovely hand-painted sign at El Chavo Supermercado by 29th & Mission in SF — boxy, angular, inconsistent, alive! it reminds me of paper cutouts. i wonder what the painting process was — mask off the bounding rectangle and counters and roller-paint the rest?
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 20/10/2025
#fontober day 20: finished the script face from yesterday. it's nice to have an easy day! not sure about that v/w tho, one day i'll learn to draw them properly. also check out that wavy em dash hell yeah
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 19/10/2025
#fontober day 19: i'm feeling a little under the weather so i was only able to get part of an alphabet done, a cursive script based on some doodles i did with a pressure-sensitive pen in Procreate. i think it shows promise! hopefully i can finish it tomorrow
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 18/10/2025
#fontober day 18: sketched a scripty italic. this one might benefit from more iteration because it's hard to get the color consistent across letters with lots of hooks (m n u) and letters with open spaces (c r). the curly d i drew didn't work out, sadly
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 17/10/2025
#fontober day 17: i drew a wide uppercase to complement the lowercase from day 6, inspired in part by the painted town names along the ceiling of the SF ferry building (though my serifs aren't nearly as extravagant)
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 16/10/2025
#fontober day 16 (halfway point woooooo): sketched a somewhat unhinged black unicase where all the letters are the same height. the 'a' started as an upside-down 'g' — not sure i've ever done that before!
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 15/10/2025
#fontober day 15: i spotted this hand-painted sign at Librería Palabra de Dios in SF (palabradediossf.com) and fell in love with the funky R sticking its leg out like it's trying to trip somebody. the sign only has 14 letters of the alphabet so i had to extrapolate quite a bit
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 14/10/2025
#fontober day 14: today's idea is a geometric slab serif italic, where the stems are tilted but everything else is kept (more or less) straight, including the serifs and rounds. spacing is tough!
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 13/10/2025
#fontober day 13: i decided to make caps for the lowercase from day 4. drawing an uppercase grotesque is at the same time very formulaic (there are only so many ways you can make E F H I L T out of rectangles) and very fiddly (it's very easy for B G M W to feel too dark)
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 12/10/2025
#fontober day 12: this typecooker was more work than i was expecting. tapering the stems toward the middle makes the outlines much more complex and hard to manipulate (and extra-light faces are even less forgiving). the hooks in a, c, and r usually have ball terminals but s has serifs — why is that?
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 11/10/2025
#fontober day 11: i added a "signpainter's shadow" to day 1's font by outsetting each glyph's path, deleting the segments that don't face the direction of the shadow, and stroking the remaining segments with a round brush. i like how it differs from just putting the text on an offset copy of itself
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 10/10/2025
#fontober day 10: @macrael.com prompted me with the phrase "attack font" and i ran with it, imagining something that might be painted on the side of a plane, bold and pointy with no curves
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 09/10/2025
#fontober day 9: if bees developed electronic displays they might look like this, a 12-segment hex cell based on a triangular grid. it works for the most part but the constraints are evident in letters like T, m, x. the cell tiles the grid when staggered so you can use it to hide messages (image 3)
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 08/10/2025
#fontober day 8: i always wanted to try a slab serif and typecooker said i should so i guess today's the day. i'm not quite sure how to get k and x to work right tho… as it is it just looks like they're all serifs
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 07/10/2025
#fontober day 7: the nice thing about typecookers is that you can pick and choose which parts you want to follow. today i got "no contrast, extra bold condensed" and decided to make the ends rounded for funsies. shrinking the counter of 'g' to make room for the tail is one of my favorite tricks
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 06/10/2025
#fontober day 6: did another typecooker asking for a wide high-contrast face with translation stress. couldn't resist the tilted 'e'. i feel like it has slightly spooky fall vibes!
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 05/10/2025
#fontober day 5: i love the lettering in "an ideal boy: charts from india" by sirish rao et al. here i extrapolated the ultra-wide hand used in "OUR HELPERS" to a whole alphabet. there were some tough decisions — should I have made the C/G/D rounded like the P/R instead of square like the O?
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 04/10/2025
#fontober day 4: i'm a huge fan of franklin gothic and narrow grotesques in that vein so i decided to try drawing one. turns out it's super hard — with no serifs to distract the eye, every mistake in thickness and curvature is much more apparent
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 03/10/2025
#fontober day 3: i asked a friend for a prompt and he said "maximum ornamentation", so i did what i could in a 3 hour time frame. think circuses and toy chests
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 02/10/2025
#fontober day 2: sometimes too much constraint is a bad thing. typecooker suggested "octagonal curves" and i decided to try a bodoni-esque face using only straight and 45° lines. turns out non-45° lines are important for A N X Z which look a little wonky here. the result reminds me of cross stitch
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 01/10/2025
hey we're back with another #fontober, the silly challenge i give myself every year where i do some type design every day during the month of october and post the results here. today i'm kicking things off with a typecooker-inspired high-contrast marker face
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 04/03/2025
i helped out with a letter-carving workshop at @letterformarchive.org over the weekend and made my own little piece! 8"×8" limestone
a square of limestone with the word "light" carved into it in lowercase
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 09/01/2025
appears to be from "the arms of morpheus: essays on swedenborg and mysticism" by stephen mcneilly, 2007
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 10/12/2024
a dialogue between patrick and man ray from spongebob:

MAN RAY (showing patrick a picture of a notated quarter note triplet): what's this called?
PATRICK: a triplet
MAN RAY: what does it mean?
PATRICK: divide a half note into three equal parts
MAN RAY: so all the notes have the same length, right?
PATRICK: yup
MAN RAY: ok, let's hear it
PATRICK: (sings a notated tresillo)
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 10/11/2024
i just hit a milestone on chough: basic latin uppercase and lowercase drawn for all four masters! miles to go before i sleep (figures, cyrillic, full western and central european character sets remain) but i think this is headed in the right direction
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 01/11/2024
#fontober day 31: last day! i asked @macrael.com for an idea and he suggested "pumpkin" so i imagined what it would look like if letters sprouted curly tendrils like the ones on pumpkin vines. not sure it works all the way but done is better than not
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 31/10/2024
#fontober day 30: drew a companion lowercase for the uppercase from day 2. heavy weight + small descender = few options for a two-story 'g' so i ended up using a hobo-style tail. 's' and 'g' took the most time, but usual trouble spots kvxwyz went surprisingly quick
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 30/10/2024
#fontober day 29: tfw you only have an hour left in the day and you're tired and ready for fontober to be over so you just knock out a silly geometric display face only to realize halfway through that you've subconsciously bitten the au bon pain logo. oh well, idc, i love my little coffee bean 'o'
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 29/10/2024
#fontober day 28: finished the cyrillic inventory of chough in both uppercase and lowercase for light and black, and made sure that it interpolates well. next up is italics
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 28/10/2024
#fontober day 27: started on caps for the ribbon face from day 23. it's surprisingly harder than lowercase — there are many points where three strokes come together in letters like E, F, H, T that don't have a natural execution with ribbons
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chris willmore @treedub.org · 27/10/2024
#fontober day 26: today i wanted to make something along the lines of the super-wide monolinear faces used for logos on the back of cars. i don't know if i quite got there but i think the slightly diagonal tip on the ends of the horizontal and vertical strokes is fun and gives it a little edge
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