Portfolio
Typography of Christian Schwartz
Type designer Christian Schwartz’s roadside
attraction.
Text by Karen E. Steen
March 2004
Type designer Christian Schwartz bases his fonts on an unexpected
juxtaposition of design theory and historical letterforms with
hand-painted roadside designs, license plates, and hardware-store
stencils. “Something I’ve tried to do in my work is mix high
and low,” he says, “putting them both on equal footing.”
His typeface Los Feliz is based on the signage at an auto
mechanic’s shop in Los Angeles; Neutra-face is an interpretation of
the metal addresses that Modernist architect Richard Neutra hung on his
buildings.
The fonts Schwartz calls the Pittsburgh Project—drawn while he was
a student at Carnegie Mellon—apply sophisticated concepts to forms
with humble origins. Interested in designing a monospaced typeface,
where each letter gets the same amount of space in a line, Schwartz came
up with Pennsylvania, which took inspiration from the state license
plate. 5608 is based on a stencil set he found. Local Gothic derives its
mismatched letterforms from a Rally’s hamburger stand Schwartz used
to walk by on his way to class. “It looked like they had bought
their letters at four different times, and it had this fantastic texture
to it,” he recalls. “It was completely postmodern and
deconstructed, but if you took one letter out and looked at it
individually, it was a nice, well-behaved vernacular type.
“I really like the idea of indigenous typography—things that
are specific to a certain region,” Schwartz adds, citing travel as
a source of visual fodder. “In each town along the way, one sign
painter’s style would be the flavor for all the signs and all the
type in the town. I like looking at that stuff. |
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