Our Half-Serif Font.
This past year has been a rather challenging one for me…for a number of reasons. Whenever I would fall down, whenever all seemed stacked against me, I would always think of a Haiku written by the Japanese poet and samurai, Masahide:
since my house burned down
i now own a better view
of the rising moon
This one Haiku, has helped me see all that occurs in life in a different way. That events that seem so absolutely terrible can lead to moments of such beauty. The worst in life can sometimes lead to the best. On a side note, when I first shared this design with Caroline, for her to letterpress, she took a look at it and said, “Wow! That’s beautiful….but what if I’m inside the burning house?” Spoken like a true New Yorker, I suppose!
Anyway, I was inspired enough by this Haiku to design a font for it. I couldn’t decide between a serif or sans-serif, so I made a combination. I added a serif feature in odd places to an otherwise minimal and sans-serif font that I drew. I think it still needs a little refinement. I went ahead and called it Half-Serif, but was kind of debating calling it Mullet font. You know, business in the front, party in the back. What’s life without a sense of humor.
After the design was set, Caroline printed it on our 118lb Savoy paper and used gold ink. We are thinking of maybe making this into a poster for framing, with a slightly different layout. Would love to do this in actual Japanese script, too!
– Caroline & Stephanie, www.pressedinbrooklyn.com
A detail of the font.
Another view.
The moon. To draw this, the serif detail from the fonts was just made into a repeated pattern.
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