I understand that my typeface designs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea…

...but I never wanted to design a trendy new sans serif. I wanted to draw from the things that inspire me. The visuals that surrounded me as a kid that made me fall in love with type and design. Arcades and dot matrix printers. Skyscrapers and brutalist architecture. Magazine ads and newsprint. Commodore computers and software packaging. CD covers and comic book lettering. Sports posters and team logos. And I sketched it all out on graph paper and packaged it here.

All Sketchbook B fonts are designed by me — Bob Wertz. I am a Columbia, South Carolina based designer and creative director and I’ve been fascinated by typefaces and printing technology since I discovered Print Shop on the Commodore 64 and realized I could pick different fonts to use on my dot matrix printer. I love classic typography, even if my own type designs head in a completely different direction. I blog over at bobwertz.com if you want to know more.

I always envisioned a brutally simple site for my type. Inspired by two-color printing, the site only uses three colors — a “paper” background color and two “ink” colors (white and bright green). The images are “duotones” and only use the two ink colors. If you change the paper color from light mode to dark mode, you’ll notice the duotones shift color as well, reflecting the change is background color.

SbBFonts.com is hosted on Micro.Blog and is based on the incredibly flexible Tiny theme crafted and maintained by Matt Langford. My fonts wouldn't be a reality without Glyphs, my favorite bit of type design software. I often use the online app, Fontstruct for prototyping designs. The industrial images are royalty free downloads from Unsplash. Thanks to Vishnu Mohanan, Viktor Forgacs, Lucas van Oort, Alex Rich and Garett Mizunaka for generously sharing your images. The photo of me above was taken by my lovely wife, Liz, who tolerates all of my random projects.