Swell Type
Since my sophomore year of highschool I have contracted for the comic book lettering and font design company: Comicraft. I have worn every hat at the company and worked for my boss John Roshell through his transition to creating his own font design company Swell Type.
On my first day I walked in bright and eager eyed and was tasked with designing a spring font sale graphic. I was completely over my head, I had nearly no idea what to to, but I persevered and I have been figuring out what to do ok the fly ever since… and I’ll say: I nailed the spring font sale ad.
I spent the next while learning how to letter comic books. With a lot of help and countless slaps on the wrist for using cross bar Is I became better at lettering. I’ve worked on Pacific rim, Starcraft, overwatch, pickachu, list in space and countless other books. A couple years ago I became the lead letterer for the 13th Doctor books on the Doctor Who all female made series. I love getting lost in the story and putting the words and art together to make a cohesive book. Nothing gives me more pride then seeing my name in print. The feeling of getting credit for your work is world better than getting paid to do it.
I have been lettering books for years now convincing my stubborn boss that the new illustrator updates are better than the old ones and pioneering new ways to translate the books that would save hundreds of hours of work.
Once I learned how to use the fonts I transitioned to selling them. I became the main sales manager for the fonts. I have played around with different sale lengths and prices tracking purchases and views and implementing multiple platforms to sell fonts and promote the sales. Designing wacky promotions is always entertaining as well and it gives me an opportunity to learn what makes each font unique.
My title at swell is production assistance and marketing for all of the work I do with sales and social media.
The last role I play at work is font design. Within the first year I started working on current comicraft fonts. The first projects I worked on were font internationalization where we would take a font and add symbols and characters to market it as an international font. After I learned how to match character designs and started adding accents. Lastly I slowly learned how to make a font from nothing.
While I have worked for Comicraft we have started making variable fonts. These are fonts that have a base font and can be manipulated to be any width height or stylization. We have also transitioned to using Glyphs from fo to graphed to design and edit fonts.
I have learned an incredible amount working for Comicraft and continuing working with Swell Type always keeps me on my toes. This job has given me room to grow and given me opportunities to voice my opinions.
