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.
About the designer:
Ale Paul is one of the founders of the Sudtipos project, a key reference for the quality of its work. His work has contributed enormously in placing Argentina firmly on the map of Graphic Design. 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 Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, Danone, and others.
With the founding of Sudtipos Ale shifted his efforts to typeface design, creating fonts and lettering for several top packaging agencies, along with commercial faces. In 2012 his font Piel Script was selected at Letter2. He has received four certificates of excellence with Burgues Script, Adios Script, Poem Script and Hipster Script from the Type Directors Club NY and several awards at the Tipos Latinos biennial of typography.
He teaches a postgraduate typography program at the University of Buenos Aires, where he previously taught graphic design. He has also taught seminars and spoken at the Type Master Weeks NY, TypoBerlin, TypeCon, Pecha Kucha and Atypi conferences, at the Type Directors Club in New York City, and at events in France, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Uruguay, Mexico and Canada.
His work has been featured in publications around the globe, including Eye, Communication Arts. Print, Creative Review, Visual, Creative Arts, Novum and many others.
He has been designated ATypi’s country delegate and is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the first one for Argentina.
This package contains:
Whomp
Copyright © Alejandro Paul
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