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Mustang Sally
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Tugboat Annie
Once upon a time, when a font was one size and one weight of a typeface cast in metal, designers who wanted new and unusual typefaces had to create their own with pen and brush. Often, they relied upon manuals for inspiration.
Self-described “typographic archaeologist” Nick Curtis found the inspiration for Mustang Sally and Tugboat Annie in one such book. Called The Studio Handbook for Artists and Advertisers, by Samuel Welo, it was published in seven editions from 1927 to 1960. Mustang Sally, a triline typeface, is based on one of Welo’s 1931 alphabets.From its stylized capitals to its exuberant lowercase ‘g,’ this face is pure art deco. Tugboat Annie is a slightly tamer, solid version of the same design.
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| Illustration by Nick Curtis |
“I like to dig up, reconstruct and breathe new life into typefaces from the past,” says Curtis. Both outgoing Sally and the more demure Annie are designs with charm and presence. |
Woodley Park
Nick Curtis’s love affair with typography began in an alley. During a routine boyhood hunt for tossed treasures in his East Dallas neighborhood, young Nick came across a fat green binder displaying hundreds of fonts. It was his first contact with a type specimen catalog, and he was hooked.
Curtis’s career has taken him from production art to graphic design to art direction, but type has always remained his passion, especially the provocative designs produced from the late 19th through the early 20th centuries. Woodley Park is based on an all-caps typeface called Sylvan, which Curtis discovered in a 1930s type specimen book from Heller-Edwards Composition of Chicago. (As it turns out, Sylvan was based on an even earlier Deberny and Peignot design called Naudin.)
Enchanted by the unusual inline treatment and the sinuous grace of Sylvan, Curtis expanded the character set to include lowercase letters. The result is a versatile design with a 1930s personality – Garamond meets Jean Harlow.