ITC Don't Panic™ Font Family

ITC Don't Panic™ Regular (ITC Collection) More details ... Add to shopping cart Price from: US$ 39.00

Australian designer and art director Wayne Thompson created the fonts ITC Django™, ITC Panic™ and ITC Don´t Panic™. Wayne Thompson based ITC Django on the handwriting of an acquaintance – “a fellow I know who writes and illustrates children's books and is also a commercial artist” - who called himself Django, after the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. “I felt that that name Django suited the funky, lively feel of the face,” says Thompson. But he adds, “Django has a split personality: it [...]

ITC Don't Panic's distressed shapes and craggy outlines evoke the feeling you get when you're just barely in control of a situation. This is type design on the edge. ITC Panic is further down the emotional track, when you've actually lost control and there is no hope in sight. Thompson says the inspiration for these faces arrived one day in the mail. "I received an envelope that looked like it had a rough trip; the type that was stamped on it had a tired, ragged appearance. Ironically, the haggard envelope woke me up. I got excited and wanted to replicate the look as a font of type." Thompson designed ITC Don't Panic, then stood back and looked at it and decided it cried out for a more agitated companion. ITC Don't Panic gave birth to the positively psychotic offspring, ITC Panic. Both are all-cap designs with alternate characters in the unshift position. Creating an authentically disturbed appearance proved to be a challenge for Thompson. "I tried to design agitated characters, but they looked staged. So I tried multiple photocopies, but that didn't work. Eventually, I laser-printed the basic characters, wadded up the lasers, then flattened them out and stomped on them with heavy boots. The end result was scanned and used as the basis for the rest of the design." Thompson's work on web sites and multimedia has influenced his interest in type and typography that transcends the cool, unemotional nature of the computer.