I have been a lifelong Red Sox fan, and Fenway Park has always been a special place for me and my family going back generations. We’re even season ticket holders as of last year.

The type around the historic park has always been inspirational. Thick, cream-colored, painted letters on green iron columns and tin signs throughout. All with an early-mid 20th century vibe. There is so much history at Fenway, which was built back in 1912.

Last year, I came across this old ticket stub and was immediately struck by the hand-drawn lettering. The curves in letters like E and H and the movement that letters like M and N in “1946 WORLD SERIES” create felt so unique and worthy of becoming a typeface.

So, I set out to create a new font based on those handful of letters from the ticket. And yesterday, we released Grandsans—an all-caps display font with those sign painting qualities and vintage vibes. It comes in two styles: Regular and Rough.

There are also some fun alternates (E, H, Y), discretionary ligatures for prices (.00, .50, .99, etc.) and also some vintage-y baseball-related icons thrown in (baseball, homeplate, diamond, bat, etc.).

Oh, and there’s an alternate backward “K” when you’re box-scoring those “struck out swinging” plays. We even made a limited edition baseball card to show the font in use. We gave away 50 of these yesterday and will probably do that again soon.

Fun fact: 1946 was the only time the legendary Ted Williams played in a World Series. Unfortunately it didn’t go very well for him (or the Red Sox). The Sox lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in 7 games. They wouldn’t win a World Series for another 58 years.

You can test out and purchase Grandsans right here.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, I decided to channel my existential anxiety into a long-standing goal of designing a typeface. It would actually be a second attempt, as back in 2007 I’d hacked together a pixel font based on little 16×16 icons. That one doesn’t really count though, and my frustration with the software available at the time discouraged me from making more type.

But in 2020 things were different. We were all locked down, and I’d remembered the lettering found on the side of a few banks in the area here in Massachusetts. I loved these “VAULT ALARM” boxes and I’d been walking past one every day for years here in downtown Salem.

“Someday I’ll make a font based on that”, I’d say, then remembering how difficult that was in my previous attempt. But now I had some time and motivation to make it happen.

With the help of some talented friends, the wonderful Glyphs app, and lots of trial-and-error, I managed to release Vault Alarm here on SimpleBits in 2020. More fonts followed as I was inspired to make them. Some based on other local signage or just letterforms I wanted to explore. I was hooked. I even wrote a little book about what I learned while making typefaces. But shoehorning a little type foundry into my existing shop on SimpleBits, while the easiest path, began to feel a little odd and forced.

Introducing Simple Type Co.

So, today, I’m pleased to announce a new venture: Simple Type Co. This will be my main focus going forward: A tiny type studio that makes display fonts and also goods with those display fonts on them.

Our motto is: Never perfect. Always a-okay. This new focus feels…really nice. I enjoy making things and figuring it out along the way, and STC will be a great vehicle to bring those things to life. My partner, Melissa Allegrini, will be Skipper of Operations here at our headquarters. It’s a family business, where we have our hands on everything coming out of our factory garage.

That means SimpleBits can return as our umbrella company and hypertext home. Heck, I’ve even ressurected the blog! We’ll see if that lasts. Simple Type Co. will be the shop now for my fonts, books, tees, stickers, etc. and I’m super excited about how it can evolve on its own as I continue to learn. After retiring from Dribbble, I’d been a little all over the place, creatively, so it feels really good to have a direction to settle on.

Be sure to follow @simpletypeco on Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to our newsletter for updates and releases.

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I used to design websites for a living. What a way to kick off a dusty ol’ blog! This year, 2022, marks the 20th anniversary SimpleBits—or more specifically the anniversary of the simplebits.com domain name, which I registered for my blog and later a freelance design studio. In celebration of that milestone, I thought it’d be fun to look back on the past twenty years, documenting twenty bits I learned about HTML, CSS, web design, and freelancing along with the lessons I learned through the course of my career.

So I wrote another little hardcover book. This one is the 3rd year in a row I’ve self-published a short book about something I’ve learned from and then documenting those lessons and insights along with some arguably-artistic doodles. I like to use mid-twentieth-century aesthetics for this little rascals: Cloth bound, high quality paper, offset printed with black plus one spot color, reading ribbon, easy-to-carry size, etc. They are labors of love and I’m grateful to be able to create them.

This new book is not about code. Nor is it about specific technologies. Nor is it instructional about how to make websites. What I hope it is: A helpful perspective on what making websites entailed in the “early days” of the web through the Web Standards movement of the early 2000’s. Stories from a designer who learned by viewing source over many late nights. You either lived through it as well, and perhaps these stories will be amusing and potentially reassuring, or you’re just starting out now and may benefit from hearing an old guy talk about web history. In which case you are the future and I can’t wait to learn from you.

I can’t help but get nostalgic looking back on 2 decades of web design. How IE6 has taken years off my life. And how Verdana set at precisely 11px just seemed so perfect at the time. Or that the web is a duct-taped mess and that’s why we love it. My hope is that by looking back, we can more easily move forward. Or maybe I’m just an old guy rambling on about the old days. Either way, I hope you enjoy it.

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