Balham to Brooklyn is a connected handwriting font with a sweet, nostalgic American feel. I made it for logos, packaging, posters and branding that needs a bit of warmth without looking too polished. Café branding is a particularly good fit. Apparently coffee tastes better when the lettering joins up.
This was one of the most complicated fonts I had made at the time. I wanted it to look like handwriting, which sounds simple until you remember that a real person does not draw the same letter in exactly the same way every time. Fonts do. Unless you give them a lot more letters to choose from.
Where the name came from
The name came from a Turin Brakes song. Balham and Brooklyn felt like the right pair: one part South London, one part America. They should not quite belong together, which is probably why they do.
My favourite drinking hole was in Balham, and the visual inspiration came from the other side of the Atlantic: old American signs, food packaging, neon lettering and all that cheerful mid-century optimism. Balham to Brooklyn is my version of that world. It is Krispy Kreme sweet and more than a touch retro.
I did not want to copy one particular sign or recreate a typeface from the 1950s. The aim was to absorb the feeling, then draw something new with it.
Handwriting fonts are a pain in the arse
A connected script has to do something most fonts can avoid: every letter needs to join properly to the next one. The entrance and exit strokes have to meet, the spacing has to feel natural and the word still has to look good when an awkward capital turns up at the beginning.
Each lowercase letter in Balham to Brooklyn has four versions:
- a starting letter
- a middle letter
- an ending letter
- an isolated letter
Each uppercase letter has three versions as well. That is a lot of extra drawing, but using one shape everywhere would make the font look mechanical. A handwriting font should not feel as though it has been assembled from plastic parts.
Contextual alternatives do the switching
The different letterforms are controlled by contextual alternatives. When the feature is switched on, the font looks at where a letter appears in the word and chooses the suitable version automatically. A letter at the beginning gets a different form from the same letter at the end.
You do not have to build every word one character at a time. The OpenType feature handles most of it while you type. You can still open the Glyphs panel in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or Affinity and choose alternatives yourself when a word needs a different shape.
It is one of those features that takes ages to make and about two seconds to use. That is how it should be.
Then there was the kerning
Drawing all those alternatives was the enjoyable part. Kerning them was not.
Balham to Brooklyn contains more than 5,000 kerning pairs. With a normal display font, poor spacing looks clumsy. With a connected script, poor spacing can physically break the join between two letters. Every combination needs checking because moving one character can fix one word and wreck another.
I always say I will not make another handwriting font after finishing one. I never stick to it. There must be a fault in the system somewhere.
Using Balham to Brooklyn for café branding
Balham to Brooklyn works well for café logos because it feels friendly, informal and established without becoming stiff. The monoline drawing also holds together well on signs, cups, bags and labels.
Use it for the café name, a short strapline or the main message on a piece of packaging. Do not set the entire menu in it. Nobody wants to decode a paragraph of connected script while a queue forms behind them.
For menus and small information, pair it with a plain sans serif. Let Balham to Brooklyn provide the character and let the other typeface deal with prices, ingredients and opening times. It is a display font. Give it something worth displaying.
The same approach works beyond cafés. It suits bakeries, confectionery, drinks brands, invitations, posters and any identity that can carry a little American nostalgia without turning into a theme park.
What is included
Balham to Brooklyn is supplied as an OTF font for Mac and Windows. It has one weight, 938 glyphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, symbols, contextual alternatives and stylistic sets. It also supports Western, Central and South Eastern European languages.
Turn on contextual alternatives in your design software to get the proper connected result. Without them, you are leaving most of the work in the box.
Written by Simon Stratford, type designer and graphic designer. These are my opinions, reached after too little sleep and too much coffee. You can also follow my antics on @itsmesimonok, or leave a comment below. Despite all the opinions, I’m actually quite nice.