#nickylaatz

We could not be more excited to welcome @nickylaatz to this week's edition of #fontface on Instagram. She is one of our newest foundries on MyFonts, but not at all new to to the type game—this one-woman show has a cult-like following and it doesn't take a genius to see why. To those of you who already know and love her, and to those of you we're lucky enough to be making the introduction for, we hope you all enjoy getting to know Nicky this week!

Hello all the way from Cape Town, South Africa :) I’m Nicky Laatz and I work from home, in a sunny upstairs studio, with my little 15 year old mini yorkie (who’s usually sleeping upside down in her basket on my desk).

I live with my gorgeous 10 year old son Ben, and my loving (and very patient) husband John.

I absolutely LOVE what I do and wish everyone could just do what they love as a vocation. My second favourite thing in the world is food—I come from a family of foodies. I even trained as a chef before I started design. It turned out adrenaline-packed kitchen life was not for me, and while I’m still food-crazy, I’m over the moon to have traded a chef’s hat for my adored pens and pencils :)

I have a beautiful white washed wooden desk my husband lovingly made for me, it has everything that opens and shuts, I love it to death. It’s most often very disorganized-looking… although I know where everything is, I swear 🙂 I totally agree with a twist on a classic saying I once saw — “Creative minds are rarely tidy… and neither are their desks.”

When I’m designing a new font, I most often start with writing out words instead of letters to get the feel I want. Afterwards I perfect the letters if I’m not happy with them 100%. At the moment I’m loving experimenting with markers of all shapes and sizes - they produce such wonderfully unpredictable results with each stroke.

I love lettering practice on my ipad, it allows for a completely different movement with letter strokes, and often I can make type that I can’t with a paper and pen. Practice time is actually playtime.I totally believe you need to balance work and play.

There’s no better feeling than walking past one of the shops in your local shopping centre only to see your font used everywhere in it. 🙂 A squeal of delight from me is usually involved, much to my husband amusement, Inglot used “Hello Beautiful” for their Cruelty Free Makeup Campaign this year.

I have a bit of a pencil bag problem.I can’t stop buying them even though I don’t need them. I might eventually need a room for pencil bags.

I absolutely love it when I get sent example of my my fonts being used in real life. Here “Butcher and Block” was used coffee branding — and beautifully so!

This was “Hello Sunshine” font in the making. Often the words I write at the beginning stages of designing the font depict it’s intended personality — I personally find it helps achieve the look you want to create when your mindset is in the same space.

My husband, son and I are lucky to live one block from the beach. There’s nothing like a little fresh sea air to clear up designers block or freshen up the senses… Our german shepard is usually delving in the waves with a foamy saliva-drenched tennis ball that none of us want to touch, and my yorkie, who has heart issues from old age, is suddenly acting 10 years younger and ready to take on great danes that pass us by.

One of my favourite things to do after making a font, is to put it to good use! I love giving it a good test run on everything I would use it on as a designer. I think this helps people in deciding if it’s the font for their project or not.