Demi Hopkins of Carnival Studio commissioned me to develop a typeface for the children’s television series The Fo-Fo Figgily Show. The show was for preschoolers and would focus on concepts like sharing, politeness and working together and introduced the audience to letters and numbers. Demi wanted a typeface with a strong personality to match the tone of the show but with an underlying construction that would make the letterforms easily recognizable to small children. The solution was to combine the readability techniques I used in my Burbank typeface with more dramatic shape variations. Wildly different shapes can look very mechanical when the same letters appear close to each other, so I developed alternates of the most commonly used characters and embedded a pseudo-randomization algorithm to automatically place them into text. The result combines the ease of use of typography with the energy of hand-drawn lettering.
