From the Identifont Blog, reproduced with permission
What gave you the idea of designing Bimble. Was it for a particular project?
No, the typeface wasn’t designed for a specific purpose. The idea was simply to make a fun, friendly, rounded typeface. The bold was designed first and the regular and italics followed.
It’s a sign of Bimble‘s originality that I can’t find anything to compare with it on Identifont. Were you inspired by any other particular fonts?
I love condensed sans-serif letterforms, so I guess I was influenced by condensed sans-serifs generally. Bimble started as doodles in pencil on paper; some K-Type fonts are drawn wholly on computer, others begin life in a sketchbook. Many K-Type fonts are character sets extrapolated from an existing style or a snippet of lettering, but Bimble was a purely formal piece of experimentation, it was enjoyable, creative play.
Bimble is a bit like an overinked sans serif, except for the ‘B’ and ‘8’ which have gaps where you might not expect them. What gave you the idea for those features?
Regarding the gappy middles of the ‘B’ and ‘8’, it’s often the bowl of the P that doesn’t quite join, but as Bimble progressed and acquired an overexposed quality, these quirks just came about naturally. A font design often seems to take on a life of its own. The unconventional, graduated stroke widths, most notably on ‘M’ and ‘N’, evolved in the same way, as did the dimples at the top and bottom of stems on letters such as ‘D’ and ‘E’.
Did you have any applications in mind when you designed Bimble? Its friendly appearance suggests children’s books or consumer product marketing.
Absolutely, and exactly that kind of usage was in my mind when I created posters to advertise the fonts. I chose a typeface name that suggested that kind of application, one that described the casual, meandering, freeform nature of letters that were narrow yet rather bubbly. Words like amble and ramble led me to the British word “bimble” meaning to wander about at a leisurely pace. At the time I was unaware of an old 90s animation called Bimble’s Bucket, and I stumbled on Kieran Gallimore’s Bimble bike-ride videos after completing the fonts.