I love American Typewriter.

Comic sans, Futura, Helvetica, chalk duster, papyrus, brush script. Some iconic, some ironic, pick your favorite and celebrate its quirks, qualms, history and personality through a zine.

Consider me team American typewriter. Designers Joel Kaden and Tony Stan knew what they were doing when they created a digital version of the typeface to honor the 100th anniversary of the original typewriter. They were doin’ it for me.

To pay homage to American Typewriter, I landed on a ‘life of a 21-year-old in the 70s’ inspired mock vintage look. Vintage is back, baby, but it’s in the form of film camera filters, Y2K ensembles duped in department stores and expressed in ways the 70s, 80s and 90s could never imagine.

And full disclosure, considering my own birthday falls in the year 2000, my expertise on vintage vibe only goes so far, which to me makes this piece even more ironic and theme-fitting.

Learning how to kern between individual letters and apostrophes, tediously trying to scope out where the serifs touch to avoid -1s on the margin of my mockups taught me about attention to detail. But, for the folks whose typography experience doesn’t extend to the graphic design realm, it’s not instinct to look at letters individually rather than words or sentences holistically.

I gained insight into digitization as a designer. Methods, trends and the tools in a designer’s toolbelt change at a rapid pace. You have to learn about the typewriter to appreciate the Google font version isn’t monospaced and you can hit backspace.

Where is type headed next? I wonder what we’ll be designing for in 2050.

I tried to remember a few things during zine construction. Number one, design can just be fun. No grid, a loose plan, a defined color palette and a good idea led me through this one.

Number two, personal interpretation is awesome and important, but so is being able to explain your work to someone who isn’t inside your head.

And number three, most of all, I’ll be using American Typewriter wherever applicable till the end of time. Cheers, Joel and Tony.