The renovated Finlay Park in Columbia is gorgeous. They did such a great job with the update and it’s now such a vibrant space for the community. Love it.
Photo
I’ve always loved photography.
A cubano at Indah Coffee.
Happy 21st birthday, Norah! Glad we could celebrate with you.
Finlay Park on a cool morning.
Finally got by to see the new Finlay Park. Beautiful.
Impressed with the new Methodical Coffee in The Bull Street District in Columbia. Really awesome to see this area finally coming together.
My family loves the State Fair. I love how much they love the State Fair. (I don’t actually love the State Fair.)
Every year at the USC State of the University address, I get a selfie with Cocky.
Happy 18th birthday, Jilly!
Scout Motors partnered with local coffee shops to buy coffee for Columbia today. Pretty cool event, and we are happy to have Scout in our community. Thanks for the free drink today! (And the stickers.)
26 years ago today! Happy anniversary @lizzy_wertz.
Unplanned dinner date.
I love these moments when Team Wertz is all together. Getting all three kids together at the same time is getting tougher and tougher.
Team Wertz’s traditional “it’s still dark” first day of school picture. Jill’s a senior. Ryan is in 8th. Liz is teaching kindergarten.
Two new typefaces for my 50th birthday
8/2/25 • 4 min read
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 there and I encourage you to explore beyond what’s already in your font menu.
I decided that I wanted to offer a typeface for free in honor of my 50th birthday that had some fun OpenType features. That free font is SbB Nineteen 75. It started life as a random Fontstruct prototype that I felt like would benefit from some additional development in Glyphs. I rebuilt it from the ground up and added an italic version, as well as some fun Opentype features — stylistic alternatives, discretionary ligatures, and a set of random icons.
The end result is a curvy faux-stencil with a vaguely 1970s feel – completely appropriate since I’m celebrating my 50th birthday and I was born in 1975. Why faux-stencil? I channeled some stencil design elements, but it wouldn’t work practically as a real stencil font. (Plus I skipped the stencil cuts on a couple of letters like O and Q because they were more readable without.)
The font is also a unicase design with the same upper and lower case. I’ve become slightly obsessed lately with unicase designs, especially ones that draw more from the lower case. I’ll probably need to write a blog post about that, but I’ll save it for another day.
The stylistic alternatives give some options for a handful of letters. The design of the letter t led to some interesting ligature designs. And I threw in a few fun icons of limited use. I have no idea who will use “Happy Frankenstein,” but I think he’s hilarious and it’s my birthday.
I wanted this font to actually be free so I chose to license this design under SIL Open Font License, version 1.1. Basically it allows you to use it in any project, personal or commercial. You can modify it and redistribute it as long as you offer it on the same terms. I’ve reserved the name SbB Nineteen 75, but other than that, it’s free to use. You can download your free copy at SbB Fonts.
SbB Certiphica
I’m always baffled at the range of uses for blackletter typefaces — from heavy metal bands and newspapers to tattoo parlors and college diplomas. A true blackletter is defined by a calligraphic stroke, and SbB Certiphica isn’t really that. Instead, it takes inspiration from the boldness and compression of blackletter designs to create something modern. It’s a great option for a certificate or diploma where you want the feeling of a blackletter, but without the hundreds of years of baggage.
SbB Certiphica comes in three widths and three weights, with an italic version of each. 18 fonts in all. The design is unicase, meaning the upper and lower case are the same.
The ascenders and descenders are very short, meaning that you can use extremely tight line spacing to get a dense block of text. When you purchase the family, you also get the variable font that allows you to dial in the exact width, weight and slant that’s perfect for your project.
I’m really happy with how Certiphica turned out and hope you all like it, too. I scheduled it to release on Friday on MyFonts, but that didn’t happen for some reason. I’ll update this post when it is available.1 The best deal is to get the entire set plus the variable font for $49.
Hope you enjoy SbB Nineteen 75, and if you are in the market for a blackletter-inspired display typeface, check out SbB Certiphica.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
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It was scheduled to be released on August 1. In retrospect, I should have just had MyFonts release it when it was ready a week ago… ↩︎
In honor of my 50th birthday today, I decided to release a free font: SbB Nineteen 75.
Scenes from a roadtrip
7/25/25 • 3 min read
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 time and eventually stopped for the night in Indiana. Liz had never seen Batavia, Illinois where I grew up, so that was our first stop. The next day, we got to Batavia around lunchtime and ate in a pub where the grocery store used to be. Spent some time driving around town and got to see our old house and the church that my dad was pastor. Crazy to see how much has changed and how much is still the same.
In retrospect, this workroom in the church was a great influence for me, filled with copiers, paper, folding machines. Everything a someday graphic designer might love. The door was exactly the same as I remember it.
We found the old windmill by the Fox River where we used to go sledding…
…and even paid a visit to the coolest school field trip location in the world, Fermilab.
Once we got to Chicago, we walked over to Lake Michigan and Navy Pier.
We walked along the Chicago River. And the John Hancock building was a couple of blocks from our hotel. We tried to walk as much as possible, but the heat was pretty bad the last day we were there.
We met a few dinosaurs at the Field Museum. I wanted to visit Sue, the T-Rex. But Liz loved Maximo, the Titanosaurus.
We made it to Wrigley for the Cubs game. I got to see the Cubs beat the Royals 6-0 in a game that included a little bit of everything including Suzuki stealing home.
To break up the trip on the way back, we stopped in Lexington, Kentucky and had an amazing dinner at Dudley’s on Short. I’ve never been to Lexington before and it was great.
We had a wonderful time, even if road construction threw us a couple of curveballs. Really thankful for Apple Maps, which made some time-saving route recommendations. The kids had a great time at camp. And we’re finally back home.
Next week, we celebrate my 50th birthday for real, but this experience was exactly what I wanted.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
Excited that Cotton Bureau has finally added custom stickers. I added a few sticker designs, including my old film camera stickers.
