Brush fonts seem to be very popular at the moment, with lots of really great fonts around. So it's about time I threw my hat in the ring and release my own hand-painted/drawn brush font. Introducing Moorgate, a hand-drawn brush script font. Created with Indian ink, a brush, and a scanner. It has a quirky look and feel with a slight touch of grunge about it.
Working on the name
I’m writing this story on the tube on the way to work. Trying to think of a good font name. It was staring me in the face—in the form of the London tube map. Moorgate. Moorgate. Yup. Moorgate.
Moorgate
I’ve called it Moorgate, and its name is a tube stop on the northern line. It's also an area in London town and I used to work there back in the day. Moorgate was originally built by those Romans and it used to have a gate, hence the gate part in the name. The gate never survived, but the name did, so I'm borrowing it for my brush font. That's the quickest history lesson you've ever had.
Moorgate type inspiration
The hand-drawn typeface for the album Achtung Baby always intrigued me. I loved the look and energy of it. It's like halfway between a Jackson Pollock drip painting and a Gerald Scarfe drawing. That's the inspiration I drew upon for my typeface. It ended up, well, not looking like it, but that's okay, that's good. It's a homage.
Fonts are a fashion accessory
The funny thing is that this type of font tends to be used for wedding invites. Not that I’m against that—I’m not. In fact, I like that. Such a formal occasion using such informal typefaces—that's awesome. It shows how everything is more tailored, more tailored to the people involved and how typography can move with the times.
Capture the energy
I’m trying to capture the carefree energy that a hand and brush can create. Not as easy as it sounds. When you try and control things too much you lose something in the process. It looks forced and contrived. I didn’t want that, I wanted it to look natural. In the process of creating Moorgate I did lose some of the energy, I'm not afraid to admit it, such as life or as the French say C'est la vie.
Less talk, more font
I’ve started to talk bollocks, and that's not good, so let's see some examples of what Moorgate can do. Lyrics by Elbow, Switching off.
Get Moorgate
In total the font has 404 glyphs, it has support for Western, Central, and South Eastern languages. It has upper/lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, math, and symbols. It has a ton of discretionary ligatures, so please make sure you enable them in your app. In fact, if you buy the font please make sure discretionary ligatures are on. It will look odd without it.
Conclusion
Script typefaces are one of the hardest to kern. Getting the characters to meet at the right point, well, that is a right royal pain. It took me days and days to kern, created more ligatures and kern again. I don't want to do another one for a while. It was worth the effort, hopefully, you will think so too.
That is all.