Hong Kong Vernacular
Thinking back, it’s funny how my career choice as a type designer/typographer was rather inevitable – I grew up surrounded by all this stuff! That place is saturated with type/letters/characters of all sorts. I went back there in 2000 and captured some of it on tape.

Oswald’s Cooper
When I mention Cooper, and you live in Europe, chances are that you would cringe at the thought of those cute and cuddly letters in orange flying across the sky. Trust me, Cooper is in fact a beautiful type – it is soft but definitetly not flabby; it is a type with ‘bones.’ Here are some (at least, to me) gorgeous images of the Cooper family as they appear in my Bernhard Brothers & Spindler type specimen book (c.1931).

Avant Garde ligatures and alternates
‘Serious’ typographers despise it, typography instructors condemn it, you get ridiculed when you use it. Avant Garde is a typeface a lot of designers (including me) secretly admire. Granted, it makes a terrible text typeface, but its early incarnation contained juicy ligatures (or ‘logograms’ if you will) and alternates, originally designed by Herb Lubalin for Avant Garde magazine. These are all but disappeared from contemporary digital cuts. These images are from a huge collection of Letraset dry transfer lettering sheets I inherited from a local designer a few years back.