As a child, Mark Simonson spent countless hours drawing, seated at the living coffee table while watching classic shows like Batman and The Flintstones. In those early days, he imagined himself growing up to be a cartoonist or visual artist one day, a career consideration that was greatly influenced by uncles who worked in art and graphic design.
Mark’s engineer father also left his mark on his son’s future career. Mark spent a great deal of time in his dad’s basement workshop, learning about things and how they worked, and gaining quite a bit of experience with the mechanical side of things in the process.
That focus, paired with Mark’s love for art, eventually blossomed into a love of typography because both skill sets play such an important role in type design. One must have an artistic eye to design letters, certainly, but one must also have skills to implement the technical aspects of making them work in application.
As one of the most prolific type designers of this generation, Mark enjoys the best of both worlds. As he says, he puts on the beret “when I’m dreaming of new typefaces, and insert the pocket protector when I sit down at the computer to start building a font,” a description that perfectly articulates the process of designing type.
Over the years that have passed since he began his career in graphic design and illustration in 1976, Mark worked as an art director and head designer before opening his own lettering and type design studio and shop in 2000. He considers himself to be a “late bloomer” in terms of pursuing type design as a full-time career, but looking at his portfolio of work, you’d never know it. He has well over 100 type designs in circulation, including what is probably the single most well known and oft-used type design, Proxima Nova, a font that has been used on tens of thousands of websites, ad campaigns, and more.
While some of his work focuses purely on contemporary design aesthetics, he finds that old designs still carry a lot of visual appeal and much can be learned through studying those designs. Revivals are a great way to explore classic designs and Mark has revived his share of type designs, but over the past several years he’s moved away from revivals to put the focus on his own innovative ideas. That said, the past will probably always continue to influence his work.
A great example of classic influence and modern reinvention is one of Mark’s more recent releases, Parkside. Inspired by the typefaces and lettering of the 1930s and 40s, Parkside is an elegant yet modern script design that carries itself with a friendly disposition. Warm and sophisticated, it features gorgeous lettering that seems to flow almost effortlessly, a breezy cursive script that’s fashionable and always put together beautifully.
Parkside is available in six weights that include Hairline, Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, and Black, making it ideal for a wide range of project types. It’s well suited to everything from displays and signage to stylish headlines, advertising spreads, logos, branding, identity, product packaging, merchandise, apparel, posters, flyers, titling, and any project that needs a charming and highly-legible script.
Parkside’s additional features include contextual alternates, numerators, denominators, fractions, terminal forms, standard ligatures, subscript, superscript, and scientific inferiors for greater versatility. Its multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and Basic Greek for design projects on a global scale.
Mark Simonson currently offers 17 products through YouWorkForThem, a variety of type designs in a wide range of styles to suit design projects of all kinds. Visit his portfolio to check out the rest of his work and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you won’t miss out on any of his future releases!
