Simon Walker is an Austin-based one-man studio specializing in designs that feature custom typography.
You have a particular talent for capturing the flavor of vintage without seeming beholden to it. Describe your influences and how they make their way into your design.
simon walker: I’m incredibly influenced by old movies, and I think my love of vintage cinema coincided with the recent revival of vintage type that I was seeing online a few years ago, especially on Dribbble. So many great talents on there; I couldn’t help but aspire to what others were doing—and have done in decades past.
Is there a lot of handwork in the development process? Or mostly digital?
Mostly digital. I find that my brain has developed a sort of muscle-memory adjustment these days in favor of vectoring. The process of clicking out a design in Illustrator and then refining the lines point-by-point feels just like the sketch-and-erase process you might find when using a pencil.
Your custom letters often have the thorough logic of typefaces. Do you develop whole alphabets for each project or just solve things on a per-word basis?
A little of both, actually, which is to say I start out developing a letter style using only the letters required by the project, but what often ends up happening is that I develop more of those letters—either for another part of the project or a new project entirely—until I have about 75 percent of an alphabet (lower or uppercase, rarely both) complete.
You have a font based on your Dirty Jean Co. logo. Is that finished? Any others planned? How does font design come full circle and influence your lettering? What did you learn?
That font has been in the works for years now, mostly because I just haven’t had the time to devote to finishing it. That’s about to change though, and I think I’m close to finally releasing it into the world.
I actually do have plans to develop a number of other type styles from past projects into fonts as soon as I can get around to them. Designing letterforms has really taught me a ton about letters, in ways I simply wouldn’t have grasped just by looking at type. In trying to recreate letters, I’ve discovered nuances and subtleties about spatial relationships between letters in a magically organic way. It becomes a kind of unwritten rulebook in your mind—and once you’ve learned those rules, that’s when you can really have fun and start breaking them.
product: Gold Top Cider
client: Austin Eastciders
designer/hand letterer: Simon Walker
medium: Pencil and digital
country: United States
When creating custom word marks, Walker often goes far beyond designing the necessary letters, sometimes crafting entire alphabets.
Gold Top Cider wanted something that felt true to its Austin roots and was rich in American history. Slight variations are shown on a logo that satisfies the client’s needs, infusing a modern Austin aesthetic with warm Americana.
Walker equates clicking out a vector design then refining its points to the traditional sketch-and-erase process of using a pencil. While he still first draws in pencil, all refinements are created digitally.
