Sumner Stone is a type designer, type founder, author, and teacher. From 1984–1989 he was Director of Typography for Adobe Systems. In 1990 he founded Stone Type Foundry Inc.
Sumner touched on a lot of history in this workshop, teaching us about the tools used that were used to construct letterforms in ancient times. We used this idea of repeating simple shapes to create letterforms. I had this idea to create top-heavy letters, where the strokes could be reused and rotated to expand the character set. We started this process by sketching a few letters ‘R’ ‘O’ ‘M’ ‘A’ ‘N’ which contained most of the straights, rounds, and angles we would need strokes for. From sketches, we brought those shapes into Robofont and rapidly began creating more letters.
Over the course of two days I ended up with a decent amount of letters that I had quickly and sometimes crudely put together to get a basic idea down. What I created had a comic book kind of personality. During the workshop a few classmates and I thought it would be funny to create an additional version called ‘Bloodweight’ (blood dripping from the letters)… another idea on the to-do list.