Serious artists and typographers, will appreciate this font.
Send comments via E-Mail to Rps8 (Pat Snyder).
SnyderSpeed is a Type 1 Postcript font that offers a bold (all caps) typeface duplicating the spontaneous, hand-lettered, brush-stroke used by commercial artists and sign painters to create eye-catching copy for signs, banners, posters, window display cards etc.
In their bag of alphabets (typefaces), sign painters use the speed-brush technique when wanting to create a message looking active, bold, scripted, and free form. In reality, each stroke of every part of each letter demands careful and precise brush movement and pressure applied by eye with memorized spacing and proportion information.
An all caps letter font, use Caps Lock for letters. Normal keyboard strokes will produce numbers, the hyphen and = sign, and these shifted symbols above numbers.! $ % & ( ) +. I used the < and > keys to produce superscripted numbers of “99” and “00” to give a better visual effect when wanting to show prices ending in this way: $3.99, $4.99 or $5.00 etc.
Puncutation uses normal keyboard strokes for: : ; ’ , . / and ?. Double quotes before and after are handled by the Mac’s seldom used and often undiscovered built in keystrokes for making curly quotes instead of typewriter looking quotes:.Option-[ types a beginning double quote and Option-Shift-[ types and end double quote. (It’s the key just above and to the left of the “dumb quote key,” as my wife refers to it.
A sign painter for 50 years, my father taught me (among other alphabets/typefaces) the sign painter’s bread and butter: Speed-brush lettering. After infinite hours of practice using paint with brush applied to rolls of banner paper while learning to recreate letters in sizes from one-inch up to two-foot high letters, this typeface served well when I was in the sign business in the 70s. Mastery of the speed-brush lettering effect, put dinner on our table for well over 6 years – long before computers in the work place, let alone the home, were common place.
I currently teach drawing, painting, printmaking, and commercial art to the youth of America: future serious artists and commercial artists, possibly typographers (alias) high school students – and also produce serious art for local, regional and national juried exhibitions.
This is my first attempt at recreating, my memorized sign painting alphabets on the Mac. In fact, my wife says it’s my first attempt at seriously using a computer. She’s a free-lance writer/editor and newspaper junkie, hopelessly into fonts, inline graphics, leading, bulleted hanging indents, slugs, page layout, screen percents and ad design. (I pretend to know what she’s talking about) But she dared and encouraged me to apply my skills to the Mac she had begged me to buy her for Christmas in 1989 (Wasn’t I a nice guy!).
The dare came in Christmas 1990 “to finally try her Mac and get computer literate.” As an incentive, she bought me Freehand and a hand-held scanner as the only two Christmas presents I had to open. Within two weeks, I was hooked on her Mac and computer graphics. Now I’m flirting with typography, into laser printer lingo AND even doing such mundane chores as making disk backups, regularly trashing old files and rebuilding the desk top“just for drill.” etc. (And I do it, ’cause it’s her Mac!)
