TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Jan 20 08:16:54 EST 2025

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ABOUT

Sharp Type [Lucas Benjamin Sharp]

Lucas Sharp is a designer (b. 1986, San Francisco) set up Sharp Type in Brooklyn, NY, and later in New York City proper. Before that, Lucas Sharp was involved with Typeslashcode in New York. In 2011, he and Juan Carlos Pagan set up Pagan&Sharp in Brooklyn, NY, but they split a few years later. In 2015, Lucas Sharp and Chantra Malee [at Sharp Type, Malee handles business, brand management, marketing, graphic design and sales] started Sharp Type in New York City. In 2020, the collaborators and type designers included Josh Finklea, Connor Davenport, Marc Rouault, My-Lan Thuong, Calvin Kwok, and Justin Sloane. Lucas Sharp's typefaces:

• Happy Stache (2010). A blackletter.
• Hera (2010). A ball terminal-laden ornate didone done for his thesis at Parsons. His talent shines through his award-quality ornamental didone family, Hera Big (2010), which is an extension of his earlier thesis work.
• Designer Sucks (2010). An ultra-fat and counterless typeface.
• The free fat counterless typeface Doughboy (2010). In 2014, Greg Gazdowicz and Lucas Sharp co-designed Doughboy Pro, a bubble bath typeface.

  Lucas Sharp does penmanship drawings such as Go Big Or Go Home (2010) and We're on a roll (2010).

• Together, Pagan and Sharp published Malleable Grotesque Regular (2011).
• Sharp Sans (2013, Incubator subfoundry of Village). Sharp Sans is a geometric sans with a non-geometric semi-curvy italic. Sharp Sans No. 2 (2015) is more geometric. It has Bayer / Bauhaus alternates, Lubalin avant garde style interlocking capitals, and pays tribute to those styles. Sharp Sans No. 2 (2015, Incubator): While Sharp Sans No. 1 ends its round monolines with diagonally sheared terminals, Sharp Sans No. 2 shears those terminals on a 90 degree angle.
• Ogg (2013) is a fashion mag typeface inspired by the hand lettering of 20th century book designer and calligrapher Oscar Ogg. Ogg won an award at TDC 2014. Review by Bethany Heck.
• Frauen [Roman, Script] (2015, Incubator). A calligraphic pair. The Roman is partially based on the calligraphy of Friedrich Neugebauer [on the cover of an almanac of Berlin debutantes published in 1945 titled, Die schönsten Frauen der Welt], and partly Lucas's own creation. Production assistance from Wei Huang.
• Sharp Sans was modified in 2016 for Hillary Clinton's campaign, on commission for Michael Bierut of Pentagram. They write: The newest iteration of Sharp Sans was conceived for the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign. Michael Bierut and the Pentagram team chose Sharp Sans Display No.1 as the main typeface of the campaign identity, but such a monumental project required a sturdier and more utilitarian typeface. The new Sharp Sans is completely redrawn and shaped by the rigorous typographic demands of modern visual communications. What sets the new Sharp Sans apart is a raised x-height, and newly opened counters that make it optimal for both text and display layouts; a new, more versatile approach, of which the two Display versions were not previously designed for. The set has Slab and Stencil styles as well.
• In 2016, Sharp designed a custom Trajan-inspired typeface for Anthonly Lent, the jeweler.
• Sharp Grotesk (2017), 259 fonts strong and several years in the making. Village writes: Sharp Grotesk sits at the intersection of mid-century modernist rigor and Victorian hand-hewn vernacular. Lucas considered Adrian Frutiger's monumental Univers suite of fonts, with its grid of multiple weights and widths, applying this underlying construction principle to letterforms echoing the forms of American and northern European wood types. Sharp Grotesk won sixth prize in the TDC Typeface Design competition in 2017.
• Lucas Sharp and Connor Davenport finished the Dutch oldstyle typeface Eros Text in 2017. Eros Text was influenced By Jan van Krimpen's Sheldon and Bram de Does's Lexicon. Eros Text B has longer ascenders than Eros Text A.
• Halyard (2017). An information design sans typeface family by Joshua Darden, Lucas Sharp and Eben Sorkin.
• Respira Black (2017). A contemporary blackletter inspired by Spanish and English models from the 15th and 16th centuries.
• Sharp Slab (2018).
• Beatrice and Beatrice Display (2018) by Lucas Sharp assisted by Connor Davenport and Kia Tasbihgou: Beatrice is a new kind of typeface. The family is an exploration of contrast methodologies, combining various aspects from the canon expansionist systems, inverted contrast, and the contrast behavior of standard sans-serif grotesks. These methodologies were dissected and used as cornerstones in building our own system, with the final result landing largely in unexplored territory. Built on the foundation of a traditional American Gothic but with tight-as-can-be spacing, the superfamily spans a robust set of weights and includes 2 optical sizes: a super high-contrast, tightly packed Display cut, as well as a standard low-contrast cut, designed to function beautifully in a wide range of optical sizes.
• In 2019, Lucas Sharp and Marc Rouault wrapped up Doyle at Sharp Type. The chubby Doyle interpolates between Cooper Black and ITC American Typewriter.
• In 2021, Lucas Sharp and My-Lan Thuong, assisted by Wei Huang and Marc Rouault, designed Salter. Slater Roman is based on calligraphic book jackets by Georg(e) Salter from 1941, and Salter Italic is inspired by two of Oscar Ogg's book jacket alphabets from 1942.

Type catalog, 2010.

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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Blackletter fonts ⦿ Font examples ⦿ Penmanship ⦿ Type scene in California ⦿ Type scene in New York ⦿ Very thin (hairline sans) typefaces ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Fashion mag typefaces ⦿ Bubblegum typefaces ⦿ Avant Garde typefaces ⦿ Calligraphic typefaces ⦿ Stencil fonts ⦿ Typefaces inspired by the Trajan column in Rome ⦿ Cooper Black ⦿