March 1997 compulsion by Leslie Harpold |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Elvis of Fonts
So, I like fonts. Okay, I love fonts. There's something about the
artistic beauty and the functionality of the letter form that speaks to my
soul, the power to visually stun and communicate a message of both literal
and aesthetic proportions is a powerful medium when properly harnessed. I
dream of the day when I can say, confidently - okay, enough, I really don't
need another font. I am sated. However, as my 54 megabyte font directory
tells me, this day could be some time off.
Font Geek, Fontaholic, Font Fiend, the names all mean nothing to me. My
love of fonts ranges from the quiet simplicity of Gill Sans to the
decadent curves and cadence of Lucida Handwriting. Display fonts, text
fonts, I love them all, and even Dingbats have a special place in my heart.
I'm about out of the "grunge" font phase, having chosen "crack babies" as
my deteriorated typewriter font of choice in that era, but the whole of the
techno fonts is overtaking me.
In my never-ending quest for fonts, I came upon one man who would change my
life forever.
Type designers have long been unheralded, faceless last names - Bodoni,
Goudy, Cooper, Snell, names we can never put faces or personalities with.
They are legendary typographers though, and they get their props in design
schools worldwide. These, however are postmodern times, and today's font
consumer cries out for a fontographer with panache and style, someone to
get all girl gooey over because the ascender on the lowercase "h" just has
that certain something that makes you feel all tingly.
I am in love with Chank Diesel.
Not the mature kind of romantic love either, sliding nicely into Maslow's
hierarchy of love with the whole intellectual and sexual elements neatly
lining up to form a balanced and stable paradigm for lasting passion. It
goes way deeper than that. I have joined what can only be called the Cult
of Chank.
Charles Anderson was a regular guy living in Minneapolis, until he started
editing Cake magazine, one of those music rags that aims to keep the kids
waist high in pop heroes under the guise of being tragically hip. Okay,
fine, I read them all the time, and occasionally write for them when
they'll have me. Media made him cooler, and that demanded a handle of epic
proportions, and Chank Diesel was born. For Cake, Chank created a slew of
foxy fonts, and they were so well received, he teamed up with a partner to
form the Exploding Font Company. Guess what? They sell fonts now, so
people like you and me can buy a little visual communication technology -
right on the internet.
Now, all the fonts are display fonts - if I was forced to read anything
resembling large blocks of text in any Chank font I may very well go blind,
(albeit in a tizzy of delirious joy) but that's not where the beauty of them
lies. I vacillate daily as to which Chank font is my favorite, and the
score is affected by both the look of the font as well as the name. At
the moment, the latest two Chank Projects are the Presidential Deviancy
Fonts set - the first release being Dickwhipped Lincoln with
Naked Reagan and Jeffersonofabitch, as well as other cheif of staff tribute fonts soon to follow - and the soon to be
undertaken Rock Star Font sets - with Nicole Blackman of the Golden
Palominos, Lori Barbero from Babes in Toyland, David Yow from The Jesus Lizard, Nikki Sixx from Motly Crue,
Doughty from Soul Coughing, and numerous
others signed up to play along, lending their handwriting as a basis for
fonts that people like you and me can have for free, I'm assuming in
order to forge mash notes from our favorite minstrels.
The moment my feelings took the turn from general amusement at Chank's web
pages to bright and shining teenage girl-like fandom came when I was
browsing through the fonts he had lovingly and drunkenly crafted to find
the pronunciation of the free font Asswipe - "Ah Swee Pay." It
combined my love of swearing with the erudite pose of the French language,
and I was wholly hooked.
Until then I was just dogging the fonts and reveling at the genius of
Chank's "Send Me Ten Dollars" program. If you send Chank a luscious ten
dollar bill (I'm guessing this is the money he uses for dime bags of weed
and six packs of imported beer or twelve packs of Milwaukee's finest) he'll
send you three randomly chosen fancy 30 dollar fonts on a disk
or - if you so desire, a hand drawn font on archival acid free
paper. If you're not a font or an art collector, I assure you this is
value unlike any other.
Chank would like us to believe the whole "traveling font salesman, and a
con artist extraordinaire" hype. Don't let the shtick fool you though, the
boy knows what he's doing. Having put the fonts to near constant use, I
have learned first hand that these fonts don't just seem like the shit, they
are the shit. They scale amazingly well, are hip and commercial but
retain a sense of creative - and I hate to use this word - whimsy.
His work is in the Smithsonian, and has graced things you've all seen like
Welch's Strawberry Soda, the Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to
Coast, Prince's Emancipation album cover, and Ocean Spray's
television commercial's with Bernadette Peters.
According to a recent Chank update, he's also got an offer to create a new
phonetic alphabet - which sounds innocuous enough until you consider the
fact that there is currently exactly one universally accepted phonetic
alphabet display font out there - around for about 50 years - and he's been
commissioned to make another official version. Chank will be affecting
linguist and English majors and flash card makers anywhere the English
language gets written phonetically, and I assure you that's huge.
All that fancy pants stuff aside, the reason I love Chank is because I'm
buying more than just fonts, I'm buying personality, hipness, and pop
culture, not to mention the power to admire the letter form in all it's
glory. I willingly succumb to the persona of Chank as Kiefer Sutherland
look alike, flaky, drunk, hyperactive fontographer to the stars, knowing
full well, the man is a gifted artist and craftsman, well aware of how to
turn on my eyes with foxy letter forms and touch that place in my all girl
heart that feels a little tingly about slightly unstable boys.
Here's ten dollars, Chank.
back to the junk drawer
|
|
·feature·
·net worth·
·bumping uglies·
·smoking jacket·
·ear candy·
·feed hollywood·
·target audience·
·three dollar bill·
·compulsion·
·posedown·
·the biswick files·
·mystery date·
·and such and such·
·blab·
·kissing booth·
·contents·
·freakshow·
·fan club·
·junk drawer·
copyright © 1996, 1997 smug.com