Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Font of the Week #8: Baileywick Curly

   Hello and good morning everyone! I hope you had a Happy St. Patrick’s Day yesterday. It’s time again for the font of the week and this week it is Baileywick Curly…


   Baileywick Curly is one of four fonts in the Baileywick “Family” or set. Back when I was involved with my first font foundry JAW Fonts (which later became Jukebox), I designed a set of four fonts in 2001 inspired by the artist Mary Blair which became the Baileywick family.

   The four fonts were in part inspired not only by Blair’s art and illustration for books and advertising, but also her designs and inspirational art for the “it’s a small world” attraction at Disneyland. Blair had a very unique style to her work that is easily recognizable in her use of shape and color. 

   Walt Disney was quite taken with her and over the years she did many sketches and studies that influenced not only the animated features, but the theme parks as well. “it’s a small world” is probably the most recognizable in that it was nearly all Mary Blair’s design and the attraction in a sense really is a Mary Blair art piece.

   I admired her work greatly and so the Baileywick font family honors that. The Curly variant is a fun and happy–go–lucky typeface that is whimsical and childlike. Consequently, it has been a popular seller for Jukebox and I have seen it used on many products over the years. It seems to lend itself to a lot of holiday themes and I've seen it used on many examples of Christmas and Halloween merchandise.


   When I designed this typeface, the old PostScript® format was still the standard for type, limiting the number of characters I could put in the font. However, there are a few alternates added to this font which people may not be aware of. They are shown below…


   Baileywick Curly has been used on too many products to show in one blog post, but a few are shown below. A Halloween banner made for and sold by Target in 2009 and more recently, tags on the Disney Babies merchandise sold at the Disney theme parks. But, the absolute coolest and possibly most awesome use of one of my fonts ever, was that Baileywick Curly was used in the set decoration and signage in the feature film “The Santa Clause 3” starring Tim Allen and Martin Short. To have my work preserved forever on film this way is a true honor.




   Baileywick Curly is part of the Jukebox font library and is now available in OpenType format exclusively from Veer.

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