Summer of Love
It’s been a Summer of Love in the sunny North West of England, give or take a rainy fortnight here and there. After having bought a copy of Gastaut and Criqui’s book ‘Off the Wall – Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco’ from Fopp Records in July, we went to the Liverpool Tate Gallery a few weeks ago and saw their Summer of Love Exhibition. The best part was right at the start, a big room filled with those magical hippy posters by Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson, my favourite Victor Moscoso, and others, not forgetting the wonderful Martin Sharp here in England.
Apart from being stunned by the amazing colours of the original posters, I’d already begun to look closely at Victor Moscoso’s letter forms and start work on a font inspired by the hugely exaggerated slab serifs on posters like his ‘Horns of Plenty’ featuring Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother & the Holding Company. And so K-Type Bigfoot is born, Moscoso-inspired but with a completely new set of lower case letters that were pretty tricky to keep in character.
We’ve also started work on a beautifully blobby free version of Moscoso’s Moby Grape ‘Neptune’s Notion’ alphabet, so unless it turns out to be exactly the same as Walter Kafton-Minkel’s ‘Psychadelic’, it might become a future K-Type Freebie. If you’re really hungry for Hippydom, try our free version of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ available for immediate download in regular and Outline Shadow versions.
We are also tempted to work on a font inspired by Rick Griffin’s lettering. His classic style is available as ‘Hendrix’, which appears to be a caps only font by designer David Nalle, available from Scriptorium. I’m tempted to work from the same sources, but again to create a lower case that sits right.