For Matt, new font designs start off as a sketch, drawing, or doodle. His secret is stopping his creative brainstorming when he starts noticing that he’s repeating himself. That’s when he looks back at all of his sketches and starts translating them into the bezier curves in Illustrator.
With Playbox, Matt created a font that reflected many of the shapes and motifs familiar to his other work. He wanted it to be playful and spontaneous with letter shapes of all sizes. Also, Playbox is whimsical and playful in every form, from the color, to the shapes, to the varied spacing. Thus, it is the ultimate exploration of the creative boundaries of the OpenType-SVG color font
Despite the font’s whimsical designs, Matt was thoughtful about maintaining readability. Not to mention, the variation in size, coloring, and shape elements across the whole alphabet required that Matt make each letter super legible. Also, you’ll notice that he deliberately used ample kerning to give room between letters. He also uses complementary color pairings like blue and orange or purple and green to make the punchouts of the the letters.
The Playbox OpenType-SVG Font was designed with Fontself Maker in Illustrator CC and made available at no charge to you for this week thanks to the generosity of Matt Lyon. This font can be used on the latest release of Illustrator CC and Photoshop CC. Free download expires 11/5.
