Tay Pop was the first typeface I produced under the auspices of my university program, as a test run before my dissertation project. The name comes from the River Tay, upon the banks of which sits Dundee – where I lived for the first two years of my honours degree.
This project was inspired by Japan’s many POP-style fonts, though it was more specifically based on Fontworks’ Pop Happiness typeface which has garnered a reputation worldwide because of its frequent use in popular Japanese media – most notably in early to mid-2000s Nintendo games. Working on this project meant a lot to me because it was precisely Pop Happiness’ use in those titles that got me interested in fonts in games when I was young. For a long time I wondered if it was owned by Nintendo or even a style they came up with, and when I discovered Fontworks and Pop Happiness it unlocked something within me that I tried to express in this project. I also desired to offer a free open-source alternative that didn’t involve piracy.
This time I started by drawing out glyphs by hand on graph paper – which is still common practice in the professional Japanese type industry today. From there I scanned and loaded my sketches into Illustrator and becan to draw with the pencil tool. The result has the same Pop charm of Pop Happiness, though in retrospect Illustrator’s vector engine is not really geared towards type design work, and the glyph outlines have a certain “jankyness” to them which is a result of using the pencil tool. I suppose it gives it a goofier, handwritten look which serves the style well.
Because this project was started a month after I began working on Thumbnail, there was a little overlap at the end of Thumbnail’s initial development cycle. This time however I received some guidance in the form of feedback from my supervisors at university. While they were ex-game developers and not type designers, they were able to offer me some advice with more general design processes – though my type design practice itself would continue to be self-taught, which probably disadvantaged me in some places.
Tay Pop was released to a positive reception online and even got a nice comment from some well-known game developers, so I consider the project a great success.
Tay Pop hasn’t been updated, but you can download it here.
This font is released under the SIL Open Font License – and as such can be used, modified, and distributed freely (so long as the resulting font remains under the Open Font License). The only stipulations are that the resulting font bears a different name, and must remain free to use.
