Font Designer – Mott Jordan

California freelance designer Mott Jordan created the fonts ITC Hornpype™ (1997) and ITC Verkehr™.

The cheerful display face ITC Hornpype was inspired in part by the cartoons of the 1920s and 30s. According to Jordan, the typeface’s name and three-dimensional quality can be traced to an early cartoon in which a cat blows on a horn with such force that the instrument bulges out. For the three-dimensional look, Jordan added highlights to the thicker strokes to create letters that look as though they were, in his words, "squeezed from a toothpaste tube". Jordan suggests his eye-catching font for shorter words in larger point sizes. ITC Hornpype is a lively font perfect for anything needing a "fun, goofy" look.

The forms of ITC Verkehr are based on those of narrow sans serif typefaces but also chose a departure from the tradition to set the font apart from the rest. The upper half of each character is heavier than the lower half, although this is usually the other way around. Diagonal strokes, like the horizontal of the lower case e, relax the otherwise regular, bar-like look of the font. ITC Verkehr is suited exclusively for use in headlines and display in larger point sizes.
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