I do hand lettering even when I'm doing ordinary writing, or even not-so-ordinary writing, like solving crossword puzzles. The cryptics of Henry Hook are not puzzles that mere mortals should be trying to solve with a stopwatch in hand, so you might as well take your time. So while I was going through one of his books, I redid the grids on graph paper, and lettered my solutions in this font. I know. I'm completely disgusting.

Bayern - German for "Bavaria". Think of this as a calligraphy font made by someone who has heard of the concept, and that's about all. He turns his pen, he makes unusual strokes, and generally makes a mockery of the whole process.

A spooky little hand-drawn font that's really quite harmless. Beltane is a Wiccan holiday, but more importantly is the name of my best friend's cat. This font was also FontFace's Font of the Day on November 11, 2002. Actually, the e-mail he sent said, "Beltane is coming!" and I thought, you're more than a month late. . . .

Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Behold the spectacle in this corner! In addition to ordinary upper and lower case letters, Brasspounder also has freakishly diminutive capitals, known to the Eastern mystics as "small caps". The price of a ticket to come inside and gawk at this deviation of nature is a lowly two bits (but downloading the font is, as always, free).

While preparing for the National Puzzlers' League convention, I found I had a lot of work to do, and I was worried about whether or not people would be happy with what I was doing. To work off the extra energy, I did crossword puzzles, and I do them for speed. To fill in the squares faster, it's better to write the letters with as few strokes as possible, and, well, you get the picture.

A font transmitted to me via tachyon telephone from my own future. Remind me to design this font someday to avoid temporal paradox. You know, I thought I made this word up, and I thought that'd mean that mine was the only Daybreaker out there, but it seems to be a New Zealand road rally, a villain who wreaks havoc on calendars, and most overwhelmingly, a CD by electronica-folk artist (?!) Beth Orton.

I took the dearly departed Enigmatic Italic, skewed it upright again, got some thugs to rough it up a little, read in the resulting bitmaps, and voila! Instant grunge. No apostrophe in the title, because pedestrian crossing lights don't use one.

Graphics (c) 2002, Darren Rigby.
When, in life, you must face your demons, make demonade!