Recently Spotted

"Beat Street" and "Beat Street Inline" font.

The font "Beat Street" shown above I designed about 12 years ago. Wow, has it really been that long? Yikes. It's been a while since I designed a font. When I switched from OS9 to OSX Fontographer stopped working so I just kind of put everything on hold in terms of designing fonts. (That has changed and I may create a new one soon) That said, I have created "7" fonts total. Five of those I created while working at another design firm so my name is never associated with them.

Over the years I've seen several of my fonts in use in a variety of ways. I've seen them on toy packaging, candy bar wrappers, advertisements, logos etc. I stopped counting years ago but in the past three weeks I spotted a couple usages that got my attention.


"Super Paper Mario" using my "Beat Street" font.

I was in Blockbuster Video the other week and spotted this usage of "Beat Street" on the packaging for "Super Paper Mario." I tend to cringe at moments like these because rarely do I see it used well. They don't go in and modify how the letters interact with each other and make it look nice. No, they just type it out and go with it. In any regard it was a nice Saturday morning surprise and being able to show that my font was on a Wii game scored me a few cool points with my kids. ;-)


"Novel Romance" movie on DVD starring the infamous Traci Lords.

Then there are times like this past weekend where I was browsing within my NETFLIX account and it asked me to rate a recent movie called "Bride and Prejudice." After I did so it then recommended two other movies and one of those were "Novel Romance." I immediately looked at the thumbnail graphic on screen and said out loud "Oh no." Sure enough who ever designed the cover for this DVD decided "Beat Street" was a good fit even though they decided to squash it.

I suppose I can now add "Soft Porn" to the fonts usage list?

If any of you happen to spot this font being used and can capture it via a picture or nab an image online then please do and send it my way I'd enjoy seeing it. Thanks.

BTW: You can test drive and purchase the "Beat Street" font here.