Roadhouse Blues was inspired in part by my own hand lettering experiments and the awesome work I'm seeing by people who I follow on Instagram. I love handmade lettering—I'm an addict.
Handmade lettering
I'm addicted to finding quotes and lyrics that I can draw, to fuel my Instagram addiction. Sometimes I hear someone say a particular phrase and I think I could use that. Normally it's music that I'm listening to that gets me. I tend to sketch out my ideas on paper first. I then scan that into illustrator and change everything. The layout, moving and rotating each word and letter until I'm happy. I then re-draw the entire piece based on that drawing on my computer screen—then post to Instagram. It takes longer, but for me, it seems to work better. I'm not sure why but when I scan a drawing into illustrator I find it easier to be critical—I noticed what needs to be changed and just do it.
Roadhouse Blues
Doing all those posts for Instagram I started to notice myself gravitating to a particular style. That got me to thinking, why not capture it and make it a font—so I did. After my last script font called Take me to the river I swore that I wouldn't do another for a while as its just so much work. But with Roadhouse blues it seemed to just flow out of me. When I say flow, it was still a total ball ache to kern! It might not be everyone's cup of tea as it's quite loose—its far from a perfect line.
Imperfection is perfection
It's a nostalgic looking typeface that harks back (a little bit) to the early Americana style. Some might say it's naive, and they would be right. I've deliberately kept the imperfections. The lines are wobbly, the bowls and shoulders are uneven and the letters hang loosely on the baseline. It's like that because I wanted to keep that original handmade style.
Opentype features
All the letters connect and include a variety of swashes and letter alternatives.
Swash features
All the uppercase letters have a start and end swash that are automatically added when you enable the swash feature in your design application.
Contextual alternatives
To make the handwriting look more realistic the lowercase glyphs have 3 contextual alternatives. Each letter has a start, middle and end letter that have a subtle difference. If you enable the OpenType contextual alternative button in your application the alternatives will work automatically as you type.
Stylistic sets
Apart from the swash feature and contextual alternatives, the lowercase letters have alternative stylistic sets. Make sure you look for them in your design app as you might be missing out on some nice letter choices.