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Artist Wants to Raise $7K to Create a Bushwick Font Style

By Ethan Harfenist | October 21, 2015 7:33am
 Artist Pablo Medina, left, and examples of his Bushwick typeface.
Artist Pablo Medina, left, and examples of his Bushwick typeface.
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Pablo Medina

Bushwick's street signs, graffiti and murals have inspired a local artist to create a font style named after the neighborhood — and he wants help raising $7,000 to get it done.

 

East Village resident Pablo Medina, 44, was inspired to create the typeface, called Bushwick, after he started photographing various letterforms he came across in the neighborhood.

 

He created the text style incorporating the blocky, hand-painted industrial signage he often found on warehouses, and the "throw up" graffiti tags and intricate murals that adorn many of the doors and garages in the area, he said.

 

As an artist who recently set up his studio in Bushwick earlier this year, Medina said he found the neighborhood's transformation from working-class industrial to artistic hub "fascinating" — and a welcome alternative to the "more conservative, stuffy" Chelsea art scene.

 

"Here, it's more gritty and more grassroots. … Everybody seems to know Bushwick for the hipsters and artists, but there's also a large [Latin American] immigrant community here. And that's very interesting and important to me," he said, noting that he's half Colombian. "Sign-painting as a medium is prevalent in Latin America; it's a craft that requires mastering, and it's sort of a beautiful, forgotten craft."

 

Medina moved to the city from Washington, D.C. to attend the Pratt Institute more than 20 years ago, where he got degrees in drawing and communication design.

 

"Ninety-nine percent of what I do revolves around lettering and typography," Medina said. "After documenting many letterforms, I started drawing an amalgamation of them." 

 

Medina is aiming to raise $7,000 through crowd-funding site Indiegogo to create and copyright the Bushwick font: $2,700 for "mastering" fees, $1,200 for promotion and $3,600 for six months worth of studio rent. 

 

Medina explained that the funds are needed for the painstaking process typeface creation demands: research, drawing, spacing, kerning and mastering, which entails the actual preparation of the software for release and distribution.

 

If funded, donors will get copies of the font or a Bushwick T-shirt.

 

But while the campaign, which went live Sept. 30, has only fetched a little over $2,300 (or 33 percent) of its "flexible" $7,000 goal, Medina said he's optimistic his brainchild will be successful, and that he will still see it through to the end regardless of how much money he ends up raising.

 

"I don't know how many typefaces have ever been crowdfunded, so there's no precedent for it," he said. "Just like any entrepreneurial endeavor, it's a risk. But I deeply believe in celebrating Bushwick through the typeface."