Мастер каллиграфии Джон Даунер представил новый шрифт Franglais и готовится к международному фестивалю в Амстердаме

Coast Chronicles: Living lettering legend, John Downer Published 5:23 pm Sunday, August 23, 2026 Make signs, not war John Downer is the eldest of four boys — John, Tom, Dan and Jeff — scions of Lucille and Jack of Jack’s Country Store fame. Tom, two years younger, stayed to run the store, and we thank him from the bottom of our hearts. Jack’s is a masterpiece combination of community grocery, hardware store, gas station, bulletin board hub and spot to gather the latest news and gossip while you pick up your quart of milk and a couple joist hangers. But John’s fate was different, his path was art. In Tacoma, before the family moved to our little spit of land, public schools featured pen and ink in art classes using The Speedball Textbook, created by — as John puts it in a 2008 interview conducted by Alastair Johnston — “local lettering celebrity Ross George of Seattle. Speedball pen lettering became a cornerstone of the art curriculum at many public schools around the Puget Sound area. We were awash in India ink. Tacoma also had fabulous commercial signage. The sign painters there were extremely competent.” Now I’m pretty sure that most of us have not thought a moment about sign painting, but it was a profession that flourished in the U.S. from the mid-19th century through the 1950s. John found he had an affinity to it, and he apprenticed as a sign painter. Sign painters were a sort of ragtag group, almost like a Medieval guild, of predominantly males who lettered and painted on buildings, store fronts, walls, trucks, carts, and gilded the windowed doors of the offices of lawyers and doctors. But in the 1980s vinyl letters and digital printing began to dominate and sign painting went the way of horse-drawn carriages. Note here though that there is a craft re-emergence of the art of brush lettering which you can see for yourselves in the many hand-painted signs John still makes for Jack’s Country Store. John was also called upon to create brush lettering for an October 9, 2016 issue of the New York Times Magazine featuring grocery signs. (For more info, see Spurge: tinyurl.com/ywcepsw6 and the lovingly made film on sign painting by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon: signpaintersfilm.com/#watch. John himself has a scene in this film.) Typefaces and fonts Stops in Longview for sign painting, Washington State University (where John let go of his swimming dream and changed his passion to letterforms and art) and his subsequent move to the University of Iowa, put John firmly on the path to becoming what he is today: an internationally known sign painter, typeface and logo designer. Since the era of computers whacked us all in the face, we know or think we know a little about fonts: our pull-down font collections give us a rich variety of choices. But the world of letterforms is deep and wide. I offer just one data point here on the difference between typeface and font. A typeface is the overall design or visual identity of the letterform. For instance, Times New Roman is the workhorse I use when I write this column on my MacBook. But font is the specific implementation of that typeface: its weight, style, and size. I use 12 pt. and you’ll also see Bold and Italic versions in this column. (In the Chinook Observer body copy, we use Source Serif Pro.) So, just as a rough rule of thumb, typeface is the design family and font is one of the variants within that family. One of John’s earliest successes was his win in a contest sponsored by the ITC Typeface Review board in Chicago. His typeface was selected for further development, but as that process rolled out he realized he knew more than the marketing team tagged “to help him.” That did indicate to John his typeface work was notable. This ultimately led to a collaboration with Mathew Carter that resulted in 1991 with the release of John’s Iowan Old Style, used in many iOS applications. (John drew this by hand, and it was digitized at Bitstream by Dennis Pasternak.) Interestingly, John notes that Reed College was “a hotbed of activity in several lettering arts” due to the teachings of the calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds, and that “Steve Jobs became a calligraphy enthusiast at Reed and his exposure to letterforms and typography there was central to the subsequent development of the Mac interface.” Franglais All this to say, I got an email from John a couple weeks ago announcing the release of his newest typeface design — Franglais. He wrote, “Given your connection with French culture, I know this type design will interest you. I hope you find it amusing.” I found it so amusing that since John was in town — he still spends a couple weeks in the summer here — I had him over for coffee, and, to celebrate French culture, I made a plum torte. As mentioned, typeface design is complex, as is any field when one takes a deep dive into it as a professional. In the case of typography, we’re talking X-height, stem, bowl, ascenders and descenders, glyphs, terminals and serifs, kerning, baseline, tracking, stroke modulation, majuscules and minuscules. . .OK, I know your eyes are glazing over. But for those who want more info see https://designlab.com/blog/20-typography-terms. A little background on John’s new typeface. “Franglais” is the term used to describe the mash-up of English and French. It happens, even though the Académie Française was established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu with 40 members known as “the immortals” who are basically the language police. (I believe some of those immortals have been replaced with newer entrants.) They determine what is legitimate French and evaluate the introduction of new phrases and words into their language. In the past they’ve been adamant about not allowing English to cross their borders; in the early days of the internet when English was bursting with new net-lingo, email was still “les lettres électronique.” Now, though, they have mostly bowed to the people and “le weekend,” “le camping,” “le selfie” and others can be heard everywhere on the streets of Paris. The illusive “r” John’s Franglais, a cheeky new typeface released by Emigre, is described as a playful, historically rich hybrid, blending postwar French signage, chalk menu boards, and midcentury Anglo-American signage style. What was most interesting about my talk with John was his description of the problem child of that typeface, the lower case italic “r.” Franglais started as a stand-alone italic font that John sent in 2000 to his colleagues at Emigre. It sat dormant for a couple decades until Zuzana Licko took up the challenge of designing two upright companions to complete the family: Roman and Informal. As John said at my kitchen table, “I cleaned up some drawings from the informal to the upright Roman. But then as I progressed, I was stuck because I couldn’t find a lower case ‘r’ that worked well with the other characters. I’d try one for a couple weeks, then realize it didn’t work. It was like milk — it’s good for a couple weeks and after that it stinks. This happened again and again and again.” “Then one night I thought about a showcard from the 1953 movie Jeopardy with Barbara Stanwyck. I remembered those r’s in ‘Barbara’ as being fluidly written by the show card writer who used a brush. Twenty minutes later I had my ‘r.’” (In the accompanying illustration from the Franglais PDF, you can see the progression of John’s struggle with that letter.) From our little neck of the woods, John is now on his way to the Amsterdam Letterheads 2026, Sea Level — a four-day international gathering of sign painters, lettering artists, and gilders for hands-on workshops and collaboration. But next time you wander into Jack’s Country Store, look around for some of John’s brushwork lettering on various signs. It’s just another example of the magic in full view — if you take the time to notice — on our amazing Peninsula.