The people at HandMadeFont.com combine photography and typography to create custom font sets. They take everyday objects, like toast, rose pedals, oil, grass, and even cheese to construct unique letters, then photograph them to transfer the font sets in to a digital format. The result is not your dad’s Helvetica. These real life fonts are available for purchase to be used in your own graphic design.

Paulo Canabarro interviewed brothers and founding members of HandMadeFont.com, Maksim Loginov and Vladmir Loginov, for Abduzeedo to find out more about their font creation process.

You guys have done endless number of different and very unique hand made fonts. What inspires you the most to keep creating all these different fonts?

If we only knew, where they come from (especially the genius ones), we would be very rich. But in our case it is more simple. “In the beginning, there was a word…“. Every object has its own name. Every word consists of some letters. It means, that every word implies some shape. For example, imagine a pencil on a table. We take a lot of pencils and compose a word “pencil“. This is a beginners level. But, going further on, if we compose a word “painter“ using the same pencils, then we receive the shape of the word “painter“, which expands itš sence.

We’re all surrounded by the lots of different things, which can be made into a font. Often we follow our instincts rather than just logic in choosing something. It’s like a man scratching the name of his beloved on some tree never thinks what font he’s using. Same with us. First we make something, than look at the result. Sometimes it’s no good , but usually we are happy with the first choice. It has more integrity and the spirit. The quirkiness of our fonts and the raw feel to it is important to us. It has energy.