Silver South: An Interview
We talked with Sam Parrett, the designer of the #6 bestselling new font on MyFonts in 2019 to learn more about the smash hit Silver South.
What inspired you to design this typeface? Were you designing for a specific use case or customer? Or were you more focused on a particular artistic vision? Or some combination of both?
Before launching Silver South, I’d previously focused exclusively on hand lettered fonts, which came much more naturally to me having a background as a designer in the music industry. I was ready to try something a bit different and had just recently experimented pairing a hand lettered font with my first ever sans serif font, resulting in my ‘Golden Youth’ font duo. Golden Youth was received very positively.
After the success of Golden Youth, I knew it was then time to attempt my first serif font, and Silver South is the result of that. I wanted to create a clean, classy and versatile pairing of a high contrast serif and a natural, expressive script, which could pair together with a broad range of design briefs.
Walk us through the process of designing this typeface. Was there anything different about it, compared to your usual process? Did it come along more easily than others, or were there unique challenges?
Being my first serif font, this was a steep learning curve for me. It was time to ditch the pen and paper beginnings of my hand lettered fonts, and build this one entirely in Adobe Illustrator. It was a very slow process but I learned a great deal about perfecting bezier curves, and as a result my more recent serif’s have been far easier to make. I was recommended a plugin by Astute Graphics called Vectorscribe which was a huge help, and I now don’t think I could live without it!
Making a script typeface was also a new experience for me, as it was my first font made entirely on an iPad using Procreate. I wanted to create a totally clean and smooth handwritten script, so this was a huge time saver compared to drawing the characters on paper and then scanning and cleaning up the vectors afterwards.
Looking ahead, are there new projects you’re excited about? Anything you haven’t tried yet but are eager to explore?
At the time of writing this, we’re only a week before Christmas, so after a year of 11 font launches I’m pretty much only thinking about lying down and eating mince pies and spending time with my family! But I’m certainly excited to continue exploring some more unique sans and serif designs going into the new year. One thing I’d like to try and get my head around is variable fonts.
