Sam Parrett is the UK-based graphic designer and typographer behind Set Sail Studios, an online resource for some of the most expressive handwritten type designs available on the market.
With a background in graphic design that began with work in the music industry, Sam’s typo designs are imbued with energy, personality, and raw emotion — a hallmark of his work and the basis of his signature style, literally and figuratively. Many of Sam’s handwritten type designs feature signature-style lettering written with a passionate hand.
He absolutely loves working in the field of typography. “Working purely on your own ideas from conception to completion, seeing them come to life and then used and enjoyed by others is a truly rewarding feeling,” he told us.
Sam works from a home office and while his designs are perfected on a computer, they typically begin with pens, paint brushes, ink, and paint. Most of Sam’s fonts originate as analog drawings or paintings on real paper. These are later scanned, vectorized, and perfected in Fontlab Studio 5 so they retain their original handcrafted design elements while remaining fully accessible in the digital workspace.
Many of Sam’s most recent releases have embraced OpenType SVG technology, which enables him to provide hyper-realistic brushstroke textures in his work.
In addition to working with SVG fonts, Sam often pairs font designs together into complementary duos that give graphic designers the most bang for their buck.
One of his most recent releases is Mellow Morning, a playful font duo that celebrates the feeling of a laid-back lifestyle and embraces adventure. Featuring a signature-style script and a handwritten all-caps print, Mellow Morning is a charming font duo that works beautifully together or with each font on its own.
Mellow Morning Script is a clean, free-flowing connective cursive script written in a quick yet legible hand. Containing upper and lowercase characters, numerals, and a large range of punctuation, this is a gender-neutral signature script that speaks with clarity.
As a companion, Mellow Morning Script Alt provides an entire second version of Mellow Morning Script, featuring a new set of upper and lowercase letters. Particularly for design projects that need more customizable handwriting or a truly “handwritten” appearance, using Script and Script Alt together will enable designers to create unique character strings without repeating the exact same character styles each time.
Mellow Morning Small Caps provides a charming handwritten all-caps print, which pairs beautifully with its Script counterparts or works well on its own. Mellow Morning Small Caps carries just a touch of cursive script detailing within certain letters like “g” or “y”, but it also includes a series of alt characters for a little more cursive flourish when it’s needed.
Mellow Morning Small Caps Italic provides an italicized version of Small Caps, which can be used to add a sense of quicker handwriting.
Rounding out the entire family, Mellow Morning Doodles is a set of 45 hand-drawn doodles that was designed to pair with both the Script and Small Caps fonts. Once it’s installed as its own font, Mellow Morning Doodles can be sued by typing any A-Z or a-s character to generate each doodle, which includes shining suns, stars, beverages, trees, arrows, ocean waves, and many more.
The entire Mellow Morning family is ideal for design projects of all kinds, including displays and signage, logos, product packaging, merchandise, apparel, advertisements, marketing materials, website designs, mobile applications, publishing, album artwork, greeting cards, invitations, labels, tags, and even social media imagery.
Mellow Morning extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, and Pan African Latin languages for design projects intended for an international audience.
Set Sail Studios currently offers 62 products through YouWorkForThem, providing an incredible variety of handwritten type designs for projects of all kinds. If you love working with type families with a lot of personality and texture (particularly those that offer OpenType SVG capabilities), you’re going to want to check out the rest of Sam’s portfolio and bookmark it so you can check back for new additions as time goes on!
