the mehallo blog. beta.

Alta California office, San Francisco 1851; found via Flickr

At one point in my life, I was going to be a journalist. So folly along  . . . .

I love history, so every one of my fonts falls into some historical category (or categories, if you look at Jeanne Moderno).

Alta California is my artist’s response to Susan Kare’s early Macintosh font, San Francisco. And it was a tricky build, as I was literally going thru book after book after book of old types – then messing them up, then messing them up more; and redrawing the edges until I had what I wanted.

(Please note, when it comes to ‘grunge typography’ – I don’t trust anything automatic; I’ve always gone in and tweaked the edges until I have something that looks – printed. Printed poorly, but printed.)

Alta California font specimen

moniker
So when it came to naming the font, I selected a newspaper I knew from college: San Francisco’s Alta California. The Alta was published c.1849-1891.

For my very last research paper as an undergrad, I wrote a detailed report on the daily community findings of San Francisco – from one month in 1863.

And since I love to obsess, I actually skimmed almost all editions of The Alta California from that month – via microfilm (which did give me quite the headache; one has to really experience old microfilm equipment to understand why). I waded thru the bias, the hype and the oft butchered writeups to build my report. 19th century San Francisco was quite the bawdy town.

the dude
Found out years later that Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, wrote for the Alta California – and his book The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869) was culled together from letters sent to and originally published in the Alta.

The Innocents Abroad Vol. I Harper’s Library Edition (1903), from my own collection

archive
And today, there’s some great stuff online. But it’s buried a bit. Check out the newspaper archive here (just do a search for Alta California).

And, of course, aside from my Alta font, you can also snag some Alta merch here.

So that’s why it’s called that, where it came from and I’m sticking to my story. Like any good journalist. Like glue.

Merch from the Alta California Vintage line by mehallo

Original Alta California newspaper images found via CDNC

tags: design history, education, fonts, publication design, thoughts, typography // 1 comment  . . .