The Central Type Company is the independent foundry formerly known as Lamesville, based in Chicago, Illinois. Established by Mark Butchko, The Central Type Company has a strong focus on vintage typography, a favorite design aesthetic of Mark’s. He adores the graphic design of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of his personal work revolves around those two iconic decades, particularly the typefaces found on book jackets, movie posters, and album covers from that era.
“Type designers such as Ed Benguiat, Tom Carnase, Herb Lubalin, Ronne Bonder, and Colin Brignall created fonts that had such distinct personalities and an overall sense of fun that had a huge impact on how pop culture of that era looked,” Mark said. “Inspired by those type design giants, I started to get a few ideas of my own that I wanted to explore.”
Mark has an extensive background in illustration, graphic design, typography, animation, and art direction. He spent almost nine years as a Senior Designer at Optimus before becoming Creative Director in June of 2017. He’s worked with notable clients that include Dove Chocolate, Animal Planet, and CDW. His typography has also been used in movies that include “The Martian” and “Ex Machina.”
Mark is a master of his craft, a result of years of hard work, limitless creativity, and a passion and work ethic that keeps him continuously striving for greatness.
One of his most recent releases on YouWorkForThem is Halsted, a layered type design heavily inspired by the Art Deco movement – particularly its 1970s revival. Halstead takes a more contemporary approach to the classic juxtaposition of thin and thick strokes, resulting in letterforms that are a more geometric and decorative interpretation of the classic style.
Like Mark’s famously and beautifully layered Idler Pro, an incredibly versatile type design in its own right, Halsted offers multiple letter variations that enable graphic designers to layer to their heart’s content.
Three shading styles are included with this type design. Halsted Plain offers the letterforms with a basic solid outline. Halsted Ben Day features dot shading and Halsted Hatch offers angled hatch lines. To round out the family, Halsted Solid acts as a fill and background layer. Each style works well enough on its own, but they can be combined in layers to create some truly unique lettering effects.
Halsted is a gorgeous addition to both vintage and contemporary design projects, including book covers, posters, titling, merchandise, advertising, eye-catching headlines, product packaging, logos, branding, and identity.
Halsted offers stylistic alternates for certain letters, and it extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, and Pan African Latin for extensive global accessibility.
Central Type Company currently offers just four products through YouWorkForThem but we’re really looking forward to seeing more of Mark’s work in the future. Visit his portfolio to view the rest of his products and keep an eye on this one – Central Type Company produces stellar typography and you won’t want to miss their upcoming releases!
