John Fluevog Shoes has a lot of sole that comes directly from the founder, John Fluevog himself. One of the ways this is communicated is by using his handwriting. When I was approached to turn his handwriting into a font, I knew it was a perfect fit!
We had many samples from various marketing campaigns to examine and find the essence of John’s writing style. As I vectorized the letters by hand I became more familiar with how he was forming different shapes, for example, the triangular descender is a big feature of his writing.
When referencing samples that were all written with different pens at different times, the traced letters start to become inconsistent so a big part of the process was equalizing the shapes to look like they were all written at the same time. It was also a challenge to take some wildly written phrases and make the letterforms work in a system of letters without loosing the original character. Drawing these letterforms was a practice in balancing the unique character of the letters with being able to function in a system of letters that could be rearranged infinitely.
We also used a lot of OpenType technology to make this font more convincingly like handwriting. Contextual alternates randomize between two versions of every letter, ligatures connect certain pairs of letters (adding more variation), alternate sets offer more visual options, and alternates make sure that those cool triangular descenders don’t run into each other.
Overall, these letters will continue to add that touch of personality to the Fluevog Shoes communication materials but without having to ask John to write it out every time they need another phrase with a clever shoe joke!
