Suburban is my first attempt at the style of a complete typeface.
I envision, like lots of designers who design their first typeface, that my objective, too, was to incorporate into one design all of those parts from other typefaces that I've constantly taken pleasure in. In my case, these were script faces, in specific hand-lettered script deals with, such as the ones you may find on the jersey of your regional softball team.
However, in order to develop a typeface with a somewhat larger applicability than a hand-drawn script, much of the types needed to be streamlined and many script functions needed to be stylized. The final alphabet, for that reason, is a mix of fairly reasonable, geometric shapes sprinkled throughout with whimsical and calligraphy-inspired characters.
Designing Suburban likewise operated as catharsis, a chance that permitted me to disprove (at least to myself) a few of the fundamental concepts I had actually learned in art school regarding conventional type design. My type design instructor would call Suburban a "vermicelli" font style, a typeface doing not have the essential visible contrast and worries in between counters and strokes and/or optical corrections to make it a "successful" typeface. All legitimate ideas, but by no means the only path to legibility and/or beautiful type.
Suburban also pays tribute, albeit in the smallest of details, to Jeffery Keedy's Keedy Sans and Barry Deck's Template Gothic and Arbitrary Sans, 3 typefaces I continue to utilize and appreciate no end. In addition, while developing Suburban, I paid attention to avoid treading mistakenly on Keedy's as yet unreleased typeface Manuscript.
As it becomes significantly tough to produce "original" typeface designs, I am happy to report that Suburban can lay claim to being the only typeface out there today that uses an upside down "l" as a "y." Imagination knows no bounds.
—— Rudy VanderLans
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