Set Sail Studios is a website and online store established by Sam Parrett, a graphic designer and typographer in Bristol, UK. Sam’s work takes a decidedly hand-crafted approach, with each of his designs evoking an intense, visual experience of emotion and passion in type-form. His letterforms are expressive and full of personality, a likely result of his years spent working as a graphic designer in the music industry.
He’s experienced much success in his career so far, with his work securing three out of ten spots on our Top Ten Fonts Of 2016, an honor he feels incredibly proud of. “I had both the #1 and #2 spot with ‘Have Heart‘ and ‘Faith and Glory‘ which is crazy considering the amount of amazing fonts available on the site,” he told us.
From where we’re standing, his work is just that crazy good. Every type design he releases is skillfully rendered, beautifully evocative, and hella popular.
One of Sam’s latest releases is Hyperwave, a vibrant and energetic brush font with a lot of motion, something that he felt was lacking in a lot of other handwritten fonts. There is a perceptible sensation of speed in Hyperwave, a tangible quality borne from its creation. “It took maybe two to three weeks to complete – that consisted of one week of franticly scrawling down letters with a permanent marker and consuming several cans of Monster Energy drinks!” Sam explained.
With Hyperwave being uppercase, its design was a fairly straightforward process since there were no complications with aligning cursive characters or other more difficult details. After his handwritten letters were complete, he scanned and vectorized the characters, loading them into his font software.
Hyperwave gave him an opportunity to go a little nuts with the drawing process, given the font’s nature. “It was definitely fun to go a bit wild during the drawing phase – I really enjoy pushing the boundaries of lettering and not really following any set guidelines, this was definitely one of those moments!” he said.
The name, Hyperwave, is a combination of high-energy words, emerging naturally through Sam’s brainstorming process. “Turbowave was a close contender, but I really liked the way ‘Hyperwave’ showed off more of the sharper angles within the letters,” he observed.
Hyperwave elicits a visceral response of adrenaline, exhilaration, and anticipation. It’s ready and raring to go — anywhere — right now, this instant. It excels in designs with the intention of making a big, bold statement that really gets people excited, including posters, album covers, apparel, logos, merchandise, branding, handwritten quotes, and social media images.
Hyperwave offers three separate letter variations that enable designers to craft unique combinations of letter styles for customized words and phrases. It also extends multilingual support to English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Finnish, Indonesian, Filipino, and Malay for international accessibility.
The creation of Hyperwave, while it went pretty smoothly overall, did teach Sam one important life lesson. “One challenge was dealing with all of the Sharpie fumes, next time I’ll definitely be doing it in a well-ventilated room!”
As we can all agree, breathing is good and we’re incredibly relieved to report that Sam survived the making of Hyperwave.
Set Sail Studios currently offers more than 30 products through YouWorkForThem and if you love handwritten, expressive fonts, you’ve got to check out the rest of Sam’s portfolio. He’s actually taking a well-deserved break right now, having just released another brand new font, The Wayfaring Font Duo. “It’s a super playful and rustic font, and I’m really happy with how it turned out,” he told us.
We are, too!
