Bloxic

Sans Counter Display

2020

Jonny Gibson

1 chunky style

v0.01

Basic Latin

Bloxic started its life all the way back in 2008 when pop/punk/emo bands were all the rage, and young musicians (turned creatives) all wanted to start their own t-shirt company. I was no exception, and ‘Wahey! Clothing’ was my first foray into running a creative business.

I only ever managed a single line of tees. It consisted of four designs all centred around playful type. One of those designs was ‘superpartydancer’ a multi-coloured type design, printed on black. I wanted the colour to have more presence so I dropped the counters (how original). I liked it, and the shirt was popular enough. I attempted to systemise it into a workable face. The result was suspect at best.

As I got more into actual type design, I ditched a lot of my early experiments, pushing them aside as ‘playfully ignorant’ and lacking an understanding of the correct construction of letters (or the ‘proper’ way to design a typeface). I was all about the illustrious homogeneous sans.

12 years later and my whole ethos on type has changed. There’s enough invisible type out there… and the world deserves some playful options, built with a better understanding of type design principles. I love a good sans serif, but I’m into type that has some presence and personality. And to be honest, something about my original drawings stayed with me all this time. So I decided to pick it back up and finish it off.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of no-counter display faces already out there already, but they’re either super geometric or Art Deco-y. Nothing quite delivered the feeling of what I intended Bloxic to be. I wanted to keep the feeling of a human hand.