A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn’t always like that.
When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself.
Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I’ve come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetics, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and others sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I’m a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. The rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed lettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be a visual representation of a basketball smoothly cutting the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to the bold, sleek lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks.
That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. —Alejandro PaulAbout the designer:
Ale Paul is one of the founders of the Sudtipos project, the first Argentinean type foundry collective.
Ale’s career as an art director landed him in some of Argentina’s most prestigious studios, and handling such high-profile corporate brands as Arcor, Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, Danone, and others. With the founding of Sudtipos in 2002, Ale shifted his efforts to typeface design, creating fonts and lettering for several top packaging agencies, along with commercial faces.
In 2006 he was a speaker at TMDG06, the largest Latin American graphic design event in history - more than 4,000 designers were in attendance. He has also taught seminars and spoken at the TypoBerlin, TypeCon, and AtypI conferences, at the Type Directors Club in New York City, and at events in Portugal, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Mexico and Canada.
His work has been featured in publications around the globe, including Print, Step, Creative Review, Visual, Creative Arts, Novum, and many others.
He has walked away with awards from numerous design competitions. He has received two Type Directors Club TDC2 awards, in 2008 for Burgues Script and in 2009 for Adios Script.
He teaches a postgraduate typography program at the University of Buenos Aires, where he previously taught graphic design.
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