Where did it come from?
In 2019 I made up my own drawing challenge to coincide with the other popular October drawing challenges on Instagram. I followed the prompt list for Inktober but made up film titles from the prompts, writing them out in different “fonts” that I could make. I started the project in August by tracing out, I want to say, 45 different alphabets. I would then trace over letters to create words, so I was still creating something new each day on that day.
Barth was one of those 45 alphabets.
Influence
When I look at it, I want to say that it actually takes a lot of influence from the Tales from the Darkside logo. The TV series, not the film. I didn’t make any notes when I created it, but you can see loose similarities. Especially in the title card, as opposed to the DVD which I assume is another designers interpretation.
Naming Issues
It also reminded me of something you would see on a poster from an old 70s slasher movie. Which is what influenced the original name, Don’t Look in the Freezer, from the prompt Freeze. Which I thought was a pretty cool name. The problem was the length, 25 characters (including ‘space’), was 5 characters longer than what you’re allowed to use when naming a font.
So, I named the typeface in memory of one of my favorite Les Lye characters from You Can’t Do That On Television, a Nickelodeon series that I enjoyed as a child. The shape of the letters also reminded me a bit of the chunky green slime they used to dump on people whenever they said “I Don’t Know.”
Thank you.