Welcome to this blog about Jetsonville, the space-age font with the retro-forward look.
My name is Steve Lenius, and I am working on a Master of Arts degree in Graphic and Web Design (that’s MAGWD for short) at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This blog will serve as a progress reporting platform for my Capstone project, the final project I undertake before earning this MA degree.
My Capstone project is to complete the design of a font I started earlier in this degree program. One assignment in a class called “Design in Context” was to design a font—capital letters only, based on one of several fonts. (I think Baskerville and Helvetica were two of the fonts upon which our alphabets could be based.)
Well, I had an idea for a completely original font, and I received permission to break the rules and not base my alphabet on an existing font. Jetsonville was the font I created. It was inspired by “The Jetsons,” the 1962 animated television series about a family living 100 years in the future.
Here are the letter designs I came up with for my new space-age font:
The original assignment was to create the capital-A-through-capital-Z letterforms only—no lowercase letters, no numbers, no punctuation, no other characters. And the assignment was to create only the design for the capital letters, not to turn these letterforms into an actual usable font.
For this Capstone project I intend to finish what I started in the “Design in Context” class. My goal is to complete all the other characters for this font—lowercase, numbers, punctuation, and other special characters—and then turn all the characters into a usable OpenType-format font that can be made available for use by others.
This Capstone project is being undertaken during MCAD’s summer semester of 2020. The summer semester is a shortened semester, ten weeks in length. That’s two-thirds the length of a spring or fall semester, so I will have to work quickly. I invite you to follow along on my ten-week journey to Jetsonville, and my completion of the MAGWD program at MCAD.
