Typophile

Whomp packs a punch!

unknown
Submitted by paul d hunt : 7.Mar.2006 8.46am

From the Veer website:

Whomp takes its inspiration from the work of an American master in sign painting and alphabet manipulation: Alf Becker. In 1932, Becker began designing a series of alphabets to be published in Signs of the Times magazine at the rate of one alphabet per month. Nine years later, 100 of those alphabets were compiled in one book that became an enormous success among sign painters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many Alf Becker alphabets were digitized with blurbs that falsely credit them as “an Alf Becker typeface”. Alf Becker was not really a typeface kind of guy. He was more of a calligrapher and sign painter. His alphabets were either incomplete or full of variations on different letters, and didn’t become typefaces until the digital era.

This particular Becker alphabet was quite incomplete. In fact, it wasn’t a showing of an alphabet, but a few words on a poster. Alejandro Paul took the challenge of drawing, digitizing, restructuring, and finally building a complete usable typeface from that partial alphabet. The face has been extended through the wonderful possibilities of OpenType. Whomp comes with more than 100 alternates, tons of swashy endings and ligatures, all accessible through OpenType palettes in programs that support such features.

This is the in-your-face kind of font that pays direct homage to the vision of this great American artist.

More at: http://www.veer.com/products/typedetail.aspx?image=UMT0000173

This is a very sexy font, maybe someday I’ll have a use for it so I can justify buying it!

This is one of the very few fonts that made laugh out loud when i first saw it. Great stuff. :^)

Thanks for making a mention of Ale’s new typeface, Paul. Much appreciated... I would’ve done it myself, but I was sunning in Maui. Now, back to clearing the email from my inbox and the snowdrifts from my driveway...

you’re very welcome, grant. this one certainly deserves some recognition. I’m afraid i feel much like david: i wish i could justify buying it! ...maybe sometime in the future. sometimes i wish veer had a newsletter solely dedicated to type; but if you’ll post things here and/or email press releases to one of the moderators for posting in the News section, i guess we’ll keep up with all your hot new type. :^D

Captured from web.archive.org on 16 Nov 2007. view this capture