Brian J. Bonislawsky is a very discreet and off-the-radar font designer. Nevertheless, his professional experience and legacy are rich and spread throughout the world.
You could ask, "What does typography have to do with surfing?" Nothing and everything, one could reply.
Fonts and typefaces are everywhere.
They pop without asking for permission on our phones, in newspapers, on street shop signs, food packages, magazines, billboards, traffic signs, and even on the clothes and shoes we wear.
For instance, you're reading this article in a Roboto font.
There is not a single day you're not exposed to more than a hundred different font families.
In other words, if you exclude handwriting, you cannot read a sentence that does not belong to a typeface.
Typefaces are also everywhere in surfing and surf culture.
From the moment you buy a surfboard, wetsuit, wax, and apparel to the surfing websites you visit and the YouTube videos you watch, there is always one or more typefaces making products or media more appealing.
And whenever you come across them, there is always someone behind the process of creating a style of letters, numbers, and symbols used in printing or electronic display.
The Road to a Surf-Inspired Font
Brian J. Bonislawsky was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1973.
In the summer of 1996, he designed his first font, ChickenScratch, which he featured and made available as freeware on his website to see if he could create a usable typeface for the public.
Bonislawsky finds font inspiration everywhere, including advertisements, vintage ads, movies, music, and unexpected uses of fonts in various projects to create new fonts.
They start with sketches on paper to ensure consistency and explore variations before digitizing the designs.
Brian prefers this artistic phase over the technical and more mechanical aspects like point placements, spacing, and kerning.
His approach is intentionally more old school, probably thanks to his predominantly driven fine arts training.
Brian Bonislawsky founded the Astigmatic One Eye Foundry in 1996, which later developed into the Astigmatic One Eye Typographic Institute (AOETI).
Astigmatic aims to continually expand its typographic range, embarking on expeditions to revive old type styles, rediscover long-lost typefaces, create new and unique styles, and develop comprehensive language typefaces for the Windows Glyph List 4, including Greek and Cyrillic extensions.
Since the late 1990s, the Pennsylvania-born designer founded and co-founded several type foundries, including VersusTwin, Correspondence Ink, Grype Type, Pink Broccoli, Monogram Fonts Co., Breaking The Norm, Stiggy & Sands, and One Eyed Squid, among others.
"Original Surfer"
In 2011, Bonislawsky designed a free Google Web Font called "Original Surfer."
The typeface was inspired by an advertisement feature by California Cliffs Caravan Park, a holiday facility located in - surprise! - Norfolk, England.
The ad, published in Caravan Holidays in the 1970s, targeted English working-class families who could not afford a holiday abroad.
"Original Surfer" also reminds us of those classic surf movie posters from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, announcing "new color surfriding adventures."
It's eccentric, fun, summery, outgoing, and breathes the California sound and surfing lifestyle.
Its creator underlined the "clear and cleanly legible letterforms, while nothing is formal or uptight about this [sans serif] font."
A Summertime Flavor Typeface
Two years later, alongside Jim Lyles at Stiggy & Sands, the duo released the "Original Surfer Pro" font family, an advanced 2.0 version with additional customization options to give it more versatility.
"I am a huge fan of vintage ad lettering, and the sparks for this font show exactly that lettering love," Bonislawsky told SurferToday.
"I don't know what the original custom lettering artist for the California Cliffs Caravan Park was on when they drew this up, but you've gotta love the outright insanity of it."
"The original lettering all of that hot fun in the summertime flavor - making summer vacation possible 12 months out of the year."
"Original Surfer Pro tries to capture that original outrageous fervor and make it into something you can type at will," continued the typeface designer.
"I'd like to think we captured the appeal of the original, but just the same, you have to give it up to the custom lettering artists of the 1950s through 1970s - they must've had a blast creating lettering for themes like this."
The surfer-inspired Regular 400 typeface can be downloaded for free at Google Fonts.
Install it on your desktop computer and try writing "surfing" in 35 languages.
Words by Luís MP | Founder of SurferToday.com
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