My Ph.D. research is focused on consumer response to logos and visual identity, so as you can imagine, I’ve talked about Cracker Barrel¹ a lot over the last few weeks. Everyone has an opinion and is eager to share it. I held off writing this because the social media chatter was just chaotic, but now that things have calmed down, I wanted to share some quick thoughts based on my research.

People care about logos.

In my forthcoming study on logo attitudes with a sample of 1,000 American consumers², over 60% of respondents agreed that if their favorite brand changed their logo, they’d want to know why. Cracker Barrel did a really poor job of explaining why they were changing their logo. It seemed to consumers like change for the sake of change and when challenged by consumers (plus a really strange political...

A friend was digging through some college artifacts and found my 32-year-old business card from when I was an officer with Carolina Productions, the University of South Carolina student programming board. She sent me a picture and I noticed something funny: I still have the same email address.

I came to USC as a student in 1993 and got my first email address. I used that email address with a command line system until I graduated in 1997. At some point years later — I became an adjunct instructor and was able to reclaim that address and use it as an IMAP account. When I became full-time staff, I continued to use the same email address, this time connected to Microsoft 365.

I’ve had several home addresses and a couple of phone numbers since 1993. Those were connected to my physical location or my service provider so as I moved, things changed....

Yesterday I turned fifty. And to celebrate, I released a typeface for free. SbB Nineteen 75 is a fun little faux-stencil display font that is available for free. I had also planned to release a commercial font, but the scheduled release on MyFonts hasn’t happened yet. SbB Certiphica is my blackletter-inspired font that you will soon be able to purchase at MyFonts.

UPDATE: SbB Certiphica is finally available on MyFonts.

SbB Nineteen 75

Many people won’t pay for fonts — even professional designers. There are so many typeface designs all over the web that you can find with a quick Google search. Many of them aren’t fully featured. Some are pirated. Software like Canva offers many excellent default options. Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts provide high quality options. So I understand why people hesitate to pay for quality type. There is, however, a vast marketplace of unique designs out...

When Liz asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate my 50th birthday, I told her that I wanted to go to a Cubs game in Wrigley. I hadn’t been to Wrigley since 1988 when we moved back to South Carolina. Liz and I decided to make it happen, albeit a week before my birthday. Instead of dropping one image at a time, I figured I’d take more of a photo essay approach.

We dropped our kids off at Lutheridge in Arden, North Carolina. Our oldest is a counselor there and the kids have always been Christmas week campers. Once they were settled, Liz and I hit the road.

On the way up, we visited Buc-ee’s for the first...

Years ago when I started selling my typefaces, my goal was to keep prices low. At the time, the prevailing wisdom on MyFonts was to set prices insanely high, then run massive promotions to lower the price to something reasonable. That seemed wrong to me. I just wanted to set the prices low to keep my typefaces affordable. Over the last decade or so, the situation has changed. MyFonts recommends that a single font start at $20. Apparently, if I set my prices too low, MyFonts won’t promote them. Subscription services are further complicating the pricing structure.

Setting prices for any artist is challenging, but I’ve noticed over time that most artists initially set their prices too low. I think I’ve fallen into that trap. I’m working on a new release right now¹ and I’ve decided that I need to finally shift my pricing strategy. On August...

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was playing around with some new-to-me features and bricks in Fontstruct. After I finished SbB Roundabout¹, I decided those techniques would work really well on a symbol font. So I started playing around with building a couple of little faux emoji. Then decided that I needed to add some color. And before long, I’ve built an adorable set of icons in Fontstruct… SbB Emote.

I don’t know which my favorite is – either the robot or the minifig-inspired smiley. “Happy Frankenstein” is a classic, too. In total, the set has 63 glyphs. The build used over 140 different blocks and 6 colors. It’s probably the most complex Fontstruction I’ve made, since I normally like to keep it really simple.

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