Where The Wild Things Are is a font inspired by the lettering on the cover of the classic picture book by Maurice Sendak.
I started this project because I wanted to evoke the spirit of that book, for the title typography of a comics story I was writing and drawing. I searched for a look-alike font, but came up with nothing.
The simplest solution would have been to assemble the title and credits ransom-note style, but there was a problem: Not all of the letters I needed were included in the title and credits on the book cover (most importantly: J and Q… as in my name). I had to “reverse engineer” those characters from the design of the others. There was also the issue that I couldn’t scale the letters without them getting blurry. The solution was to create a proper digital outline font.
While I was at it, I figured I might as well fill out the whole alphabet, including the characters I didn’t need. Doing numeric digits seemed easy enough. And punctuation. And letters with díäçrîtić marks. Heck: why not do the whole keyboard? I mean… I couldn’t imagine why anyone using this font would want gylphs for @¢§£™€… but why not include them? And because it felt like a fun challenge: Greek and Cyrillic.
An interesting characteristic of this typeface is that there’s more than one version of each letter. There’s one version of the letter W with a serif in the upper left corner, and one without. Same with the letter A. There are two different kinds of S. And so on. I accommodated this by assigning one version to the uppercase version of each letter, and the other to the lowercase. So if you want a serif, hold down the Shift key when you type that letter, otherwise don’t.
While I was working on this, I learned that the book’s cover lettering was done using a commercial typeface called Safari. WTWTA is not a proper substitute for that. Most importantly, Safari includes a wild array of ligatures: special versions of letter pairs that interlock with each other. I’m not talking about kerning V and A to close the gap between them, but things such as a small letter I that could fit under the crossbar of T. It’s one of the nifty features of the font, but Sendak didn’t take advantage of it. Trying to replicate that would be insane… at least more insane than I am.
[ DOWNLOAD WhereTheWildThingsAre-Regular.otf ]
