Many of the animal specimens are preserved in alcohol, inside jars on carefully organized storage shelves in their massive special collections. You can't really label the exterior of a jar of alcohol, without the alcohol eventually finding a way to separate a jar from its adhesive label. As a solution, they've stored the tags and descriptive info, often thermoprinted on paper, directly in the alcohol itself with the specimen. And the industry term for the most important of these specimens—the ones that define and establish new species—is, funnily enough, ‘type specimen.’

Often typeface designers can be found taking photographs of the letters above a building entrance, or of an old sign weathered on the side of a building, and are used to getting odd looks. I imagine the staff at Cal Academy weren't used to hearing designers say they would like to see the tiny labels in the jars, rather than the 'lure' of an Anglerfish. But at each department of the Special Collections, the staff were warm and welcoming, giving us a wonderful tour and helping us find what we were after. Initially I thought 'they must never open these jars right?', only to see Ichthyology Sr. Collections Manager Dave Catania immediately open a jar and pull out a fish, reaching down for the paper tags in the bottom of the jar, and laying them out on a table. Like the rings of a tree, you could follow the Academy's labelling back to the turn of the century. Typewritten tags, each adding some information, spanning back decade by decade, all left in the jar in a state of redundancy, each typeset differently.

Whereas with most typeface projects I begin with a huge phase of research, tracking down any relevant specimen I can, I purposefully didn't seek to find out what typewriter typeface this was that I was taking inspiration from. I knew that part of the fun was to imagine what it must look like, from this limited selection of letters, and I wanted to arrive at a result of my own, making assumptions and using my instincts as I went. I loved the lowercase 'g' on the printed tag, where the connection of the bowl and tail was sort of vague, almost like it could be one continuous shape. During our stay in SF, I bought a copy of Bruce Kennet's book on the legendary lettering artist William Addison Dwiggins, and found a drawing of a 'g' inside that seemed to do just that - a gradual connection between bowl and tail, rather than an abrupt one. So I took that as a sign, like a 'yes — and' improv for my process; this new design could have a 'g' like that too.

The 'squared out' superellipse curves of the 'c', and its dangling 'sans serif hook', were easy to imagine in the context of an 's' and 'a' drawing. So I drew those too.

Eventually through my drawing and experimenting with these details emerged a theme; lots of mechanical, systematic details, punctuated in almost equal measure by organic, round details. Things that seemed machine-made and 'perfect', interspersed amongst things that felt human and handmade. This new design had a rhythm, like someone sitting at a drum kit, the sequence of beats making a set of words seem to dance. There was a tool kit of shapes to work with, and any time I felt I was in a bind, with a letter feeling too dull and not 'alive' enough, I could reach for those organic shapes found elsewhere. The repertoire of shapes in this design seemed to give itself permission to be overly rational in some moments, and expressive in others. I was connecting dots, more than inventing the wheel.

I pushed the x-height of the letters taller, and found the various expressive details handy in this bolder end of the family, they helped me draw myself out of tricky challenges, just as they had helped the reading rhythm of the 'regular' weight. In this way I often feel that typefaces are like puzzles, which I am meant to solve. Rather than a finished crossword or a checkmate in chess, the result is, itself, a tool.

I enjoyed leveraging the repertoire of shapes into the number designs, including lining figures, old style figures, 2 styles of enclosed figures, and fractions. The arbitrary fractions in Bezzia make use of a 'split bar' construction, which makes them a bit more sparkly and a bit more interesting, even in the typographic details that are often considered more 'functional' than 'fun'.

I found a fun way to get the shapes working together in the ampersand. I'm always excited at the outset to draw an ampersand, but I find myself pulling my hair out by the end of it. I liked the fun construction of this one, allowing the 'hook' to shine through as it does in the lowercase.

During the design process, my wife and I became interested in the 'true crime’ documentary craze, and found ourselves watching shows like The Jinx and Making a Murderer. One of the primary reasons I am interested in these series is the frequent enlarged scans of newspaper headlines, typewritten documents, and other ephemera with letterforms that tend to be shown alongside the story unfolding.

Every now and then I would see some typewritten text flash across the screen and say to Heather “I think that's the typeface from that label at Cal Academy!” Eventually I decided, Bezzia having been finished, that I should find out which typewriter face it was that P.H. Arnaud had used and I tracked it down; the (evidently once very popular) IBM typewriter face called Prestige Elite, designed in 1953 by Clayton Smith.