Big Boots Type Design
Big Boots is a playful, bottom-heavy take on a slab serif. Each character is built within a 3x3 grid using monoweight diagonal, vertical, and horizontal lines in the top two thirds with solid fill or square/s in the lower third. Strict adherence to construction rules kept it all cohesive and created fun problems to solve.
Design Process
I began with a sketchbook brainstorm, focused on getting many ideas onto paper without judgment. Then from those pages of letters, I identified which ideas were interesting to develop.
In Illustrator, I created early versions of the letters in order to determine the similarities and differences between characters. Here, it became clear that the bottom-most part of each character could be represented with a single square in one of three positions (compare F, Y, and Q), a pair of squares (such as in R) or a long bar ( like the B).
For each character, I set up a grid of nine squares and filled in the bottom row for each character and used the top and middle row to draw the remainder with straight lines.
I identified two angles that could be used on all diagonal strokes. Introducing this constraint meant redesigning most of the characters, but also created a more pleasing unity across them.
Some characters were tweaked to create similarities and reduce complexity of form. For example, the ampersand was modified to mimic the bar of the G.
A few playful variants were introduced with the punctuation, notably with the octothorp, percent sign, and asterisk.
Finally, I went through several iterations of printing, markup, and refinement.
Several pages from my sketchbook
Big Boots is bold and graphic in black and white, fun in saturated colors, and striking in a striped monochrome pattern that reflects its slightly OCR-ish qualities. The below postcards, for sending notes to my fellow typophiles, show off the typeface’s fill-friendly quirks.
