Sometimes you can have so many things on the go at the same time, it’s easy for the little things to get buried. Some years ago I began this project. At the time I was experimenting with a retro look. I was recalling the Frigidaire logo on my mother’s turquoise refrigerator when I was a kid. It was so blue, it always made me think of toothpaste and ice. When we got our second refrigerator, the blue one went to the basement where it stood for years holding pop and other things. My mother was forever down there chiseling out hunks of ice from its tiny freezer compartment.
The logo I was remembering was from the 50s and 60s. It was a raised piece of chrome on the front of the door, similar to some of the car logos of the day. I remember how streamlined it looked. What struck me most about it was the play between straight vertical stems and curves. I found the curves connecting to the straight vertical stems wonderfully pleasing and I’ve never forgotten that relationship.
This project was an experiment in designing a font with a similar relationship with the same sort of interplay. That is, in my mind, what gives this face the retro look from my childhood.
I know my memory isn’t remarkably accurate (no one’s really is) so I wasn’t seeing the logo in my head as precisely as I would have liked. With that in mind, I decided to create a face that was similar, with a similar relationship between straight and curved lines. This font is the result of my bad memory and experimentation.
So here for your viewing (and downloading) pleasure, is Mimic Regular for mac and pc. There are two archives both in zip format. One is mac and the other is pc. Both contain OpenType, Postscript Type 1 and a True Type version for each platform. I plan to finish the family with bold, italic and bold-italic later on. The download link is at the bottom of this page.
I think this face has a pleasing retro feel. Tracked out, Mimic takes on a more modern look.
Tags: design, type, type design, typography
