Based in beautiful Sanibel, Florida, Yellow Design Studio is well known throughout the world of graphic design. Established by Ryan and Rena Martinson, what began as a print and web design business back in 2004 has blossomed into a collaborative studio and foundry that focuses on both type design and fine art.
While Rena works on the fine art end of things, Ryan handles the graphic design and typography side. While Ryan had a background in graphic design to begin with, previously working at a small graphic design studio in addition to Yellow Design Studio, he is completely self-taught in the field of type design. His work as a graphic designer is what first introduced him to fonts, something that he loved to work with and wanted to learn more about. So he did what any curious person would do and essentially immersed himself in font and type study.
No stranger to the importance that fonts play in graphic design, Ryan learned everything he could about what makes one font stand out over others, and how even small design details play a big role in a font’s architecture and visual impact.
When he was ready to explore type design for himself, Ryan got a copy of FontLab Studio and went to work. Granted, it took a lot of trial and error and Google became one of his best friends when it came to figuring things out, but he stuck with it and learned a lot through the process.
Since those early days of plugging away in FontLab, Ryan has experienced an incredible amount of success with his typography. Yellow Design Studio’s type designs have been licensed by notable companies around the world and it’s played a starring role in numerous marketing campaigns for businesses that include Chilis, Modelo Beer, Dr Pepper, and even the San Jose Sharks.
Yellow Design Studio’s type designs are typically heavy on the texture with an emphasis on vintage style. While many of their textured designs feature a “clean” version sans the weathered appearance, one of their more recent releases is fresh and contemporary, with nary a distressed texture in sight.
Draft is an entire type suite with a crisply-designed, modern flair. Draft is a workhorse family of 144 geometric sans serif fonts with a much more corporate spin than most of Yellow Design Studio’s previous work, yet it carries itself with a friendly demeanor that isn’t aggressive, stuffy, or formal. Draft is warm and approachable, offering high legibility even in small point. It’s ideal for design projects with large or small outputs, including displays, signage, headlines, editorials, body copy, advertising, corporate communications, letterhead, logos, website designs, white papers, publishing, mobile applications, product packaging, labels, business cards, infographics, and presentations.
Offering nine weights that range from Hairline to Black in eight widths with corresponding italics for each, Draft is a fantastic choice for identity and branding projects that require design cohesion across multiple media types and sizes.
As Ryan progressed through his type design crash course, he’s spent quite a lot of time learning about OpenType features and how to incorporate more of them in Yellow Design Studio’s releases. Draft is loaded with additional features that include case sensitive forms, numerators, denominators, automatic fractions, standard ligatures, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, superscript, scientific inferiors, ornaments, swash, titling alternates, and stylistic alternates. Draft’s multilingual support is extensive, too, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Basic Greek for exceptionally far-reaching global accessibility.
If you like Draft but you’re not completely sure about it, you can try the full versions of Draft B Regular and Italic for free!
Yellow Design Studio currently offers 27 products through YouWorkForThem, a range of vintage and contemporary type designs to suit a wide variety of project types and themes. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you can check back often for new releases!