About Designing Springfield

I'm a graphic designer - illustrator - cartoonist with a fondness for typography and a liking of the Simpsons. It seems only natural to put them together and have a little fun with the world of Springfield. It might also lead to paying work....

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The Canyonero

This is actually where the "designing Springfield" idea started; a few years ago, I bought a 1983 Jeep Wagoneer, which the kids promptly dubbed "Canyonero." I went searching online for screengrabs for the episode hoping to find a nice logo, but no luck. When I watched the episode again, I found that they never really had one.

There seems to be another federal law, requiring that all large vehicles feature their name lettered in bold, oblique (not italic, thank you), upper-case, sans serif type. Look around you on the road; all the big trucks and SUVs follow the rule. So we will too.

I've chosen Chimes, a genuinely horrible font, available on all those free font pages and worth about what you pay for it. Chimes has no lower-case letters, no punctuation to speak of, and no accent or foreign characters. It's almost useless. Almost. In this case, it perfectly serves our needs. It's blocky and extended, with rounded corners and squared-off shapes, exactly what's called for in the gigantic automobile category.

For the Canyonero treatment, I've skewed the type 12 degrees to the right, kerned it tightly, given it a fake extruded look, and rendered it in a cheesy faux-chrome finish. Everything you expect from the nameplate on the door of a car that can herd rhinos.

No comments:

Post a Comment