While walking around New York City one day, Jesse Ragan happened upon a string of unconventional letters bluntly printed on the side of a cardboard shipping box from a hand-carved flexo plate. The letters’ original creator is unknown, but Jesse decided to pay homage to the unpretentious forms via an all-caps typeface, in Regular and Stencil versions, that preserves the brawn and bite of its analog inspiration.
A system of bulges and pinches underlies
Export’s irreverent internal logic. Rough edges lend a soft finish to the face’s blocky heft. Eccentric shapes command attention when isolated, but an industrial rhythm takes hold in chunks of text.
Export Stencil turns the playful concept of the original on its side, with a network of breaks that are at once pragmatic and illogical. Although a collection of shipping caution symbols are enclosed, this is one durable package.
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Download the PDF here
Ben Kiel and Jesse Ragan make useful, quietly offbeat fonts at their independent digital foundry, XYZ Type, which operates in the interwebs between St. Louis and New York. After hiring each other back and forth and realizing they worked well together, the pair launched XYZ Type in 2017 to merge their respective strengths and extensive experience crafting typefaces and lettering for major brands, cultural institutions, and publications.
Their custom and retail projects mutually reinforce one another—some begin life as client commissions, while others are speculative designs that Ben and Jesse believe fill a commercial niche. XYZ Type draws original typefaces and logotypes from scratch, customizes versions of their retail typefaces to tailor them to a client’s specific needs, and fine-tunes client logotype sketches. They thrive on collaboration with people who are as fired up about type as they are.
Energized by history, vernacular lettering, and unorthodox graphic design practice, Ben and Jesse chase new ideas for typefaces that are as clever as they are technologically robust. Their meticulous development process often takes surprising twists and turns, arriving at small but significant moments of discovery that mark XYZ Type’s designs as uniquely theirs.
Supported languages: German, Spanish, Dutch, English, Polish, Russian, French, Czech, Swedish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Slovenian, Maltese, Arabic, Devanagari, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Chinese (hk), Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Turkish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Bengali, Kannada, Cherokee, Thai, Armenian, Belarusian, Danish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Serbian, Telugu, Malayalam, IPA, Latvian, Chinese Pinyin, Finnish, Filipino, Malay, Croatian, Kazakh, Romanian, Persian, Indonesian, Slovak, Hindi
File Size: 14.69 MB
Release date: September 28, 2017
You can use this font for:
- Design projects: create images or vector artwork, including logos
- Website publishing: create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
- PDFs: embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing
- Video and broadcast: use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content and more
- The fonts are designed to work on MacOS (Apple) and Windows (Microsoft)
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