I designed a type family for our product

My friend and I run a tiny product called Campnab. It helps campers find newly available campsites at campgrounds by notifying them of cancellations. A big part of how we market our service is by being friendly and hyper-responsive to member requests.

We convey this in part through a lot of doodles and hand drawn type in our design. You can see this in videos like this one that use a boiling line effect to create a sort of “dumb” animation treatment. This works OK, but it takes a lot of time to draw all those images and hand print every bit of text in there.

So, I decided to put together a simple typeface that’d save me from needing to manually draw out these words. But, because I am an idiot 😉, I got carried away. Suddenly an afternoon project of digitizing my handwriting turned into a couple of months (stupid! stupid! stupid!) of work. The upside was that for a while there I got to wake up each morning, crank Death Magnetic through my headphones, and tweak vector points all day—which was sort of fun.

It ~~might~~ would have been smarter to license a hand-printed typeface that someone else made. Unfortunately, I don’t like most of those. Hand-printed typefaces are a common first project for people wanting to make a font, so most of these fonts tend to be limited to just the alphabet, numbers, and some basic punctuation. I wanted more than that. I wanted the whole character set, including em dashes, ampersands, percentage symbols, and the works.

These typefaces also tend to be a bit too “loose”. By this I mean that each glyph is so varied that the text feels messy once it’s set. For this reason, I started with hand drawing each glyph. Once I converted these to vector shapes I refined each one to get the alignment points more consistent and the strokes more even. The trick here was in making each letter more even feeling while keeping the font hand-drawn vibe. (This took many passes and a lot of time as this family has over 2,900 individual glyphs. So, one change sometimes rippled through many other letters.)

My last big issue with most hand-drawn typefaces is the lack of flexibility—because they typically only come in one weight. I love being able to dial in a heading or subheading so that it feels just right. This led me to build out 7 different weights for this typeface, ranging from light to black. (I’m particularly fond of the black weight, which feels a bit like Cooper Black to me. It’s fun, albeit possibly too wide.)

I’m under no illusion about my skill when it comes to designing type. I’m just a hack playing around compared to real type designers. That said, I kind of like how this type family turned out. The moment we implemented it in our website, it just felt right for what we do.

We named the type family Campy for obvious reasons. It’s clunky and awkward in spots, but friendly. I (affectionately and begrudgingly) think of it like a “somewhat more functional” take on Comic Sans.

My first thought was to just use this type family on our site and leave it at that. My friend and business partner figured we should offer it up for others to use. So, we put up this little webpage that allows folks to license it. I doubt many will take us up on the offer. Nevertheless, I’m glad to finally release a type family after starting—but not finishing—so many in the past.

Anyway, I figured some of you might find this interesting. I hope you dig it. 🤙

Say something nice to karj…

2

My friend and I run a tiny product called Campnab. It helps campers find newly available campsites at campgrounds by notifying them of cancellations. A big part of how we market our service is by being friendly and hyper-responsive to member requests.

We convey this in part through a lot of doodles and hand drawn type in our design. You can see this in videos like this one that use a boiling line effect to create a sort of “dumb” animation treatment. This works OK, but it takes a lot of time to draw all those images and hand print every bit of text in there.

So, I decided to put together a simple typeface that’d save me from needing to manually draw out these words. But, because I am an idiot 😉, I got carried away. Suddenly an afternoon project of digitizing my handwriting turned into a couple of months (stupid! stupid! stupid!) of work. The upside was that for a while there I got to wake up each morning, crank Death Magnetic through my headphones, and tweak vector points all day—which was sort of fun.

It ~~might~~ would have been smarter to license a hand-printed typeface that someone else made. Unfortunately, I don’t like most of those. Hand-printed typefaces are a common first project for people wanting to make a font, so most of these fonts tend to be limited to just the alphabet, numbers, and some basic punctuation. I wanted more than that. I wanted the whole character set, including em dashes, ampersands, percentage symbols, and the works.

These typefaces also tend to be a bit too “loose”. By this I mean that each glyph is so varied that the text feels messy once it’s set. For this reason, I started with hand drawing each glyph. Once I converted these to vector shapes I refined each one to get the alignment points more consistent and the strokes more even. The trick here was in making each letter more even feeling while keeping the font hand-drawn vibe. (This took many passes and a lot of time as this family has over 2,900 individual glyphs. So, one change sometimes rippled through many other letters.)

My last big issue with most hand-drawn typefaces is the lack of flexibility—because they typically only come in one weight. I love being able to dial in a heading or subheading so that it feels just right. This led me to build out 7 different weights for this typeface, ranging from light to black. (I’m particularly fond of the black weight, which feels a bit like Cooper Black to me. It’s fun, albeit possibly too wide.)

I’m under no illusion about my skill when it comes to designing type. I’m just a hack playing around compared to real type designers. That said, I kind of like how this type family turned out. The moment we implemented it in our website, it just felt right for what we do.

We named the type family Campy for obvious reasons. It’s clunky and awkward in spots, but friendly. I (affectionately and begrudgingly) think of it like a “somewhat more functional” take on Comic Sans.

My first thought was to just use this type family on our site and leave it at that. My friend and business partner figured we should offer it up for others to use. So, we put up this little webpage that allows folks to license it. I doubt many will take us up on the offer. Nevertheless, I’m glad to finally release a type family after starting—but not finishing—so many in the past.

Anyway, I figured some of you might find this interesting. I hope you dig it. 🤙

Eric Karjaluoto

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5 years ago
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