What is the Beatnik font?

I was working at Bozell Worldwide, an advertising agency, on their yearly promotional pitch. An art director was looking for a condensed informal headline treatment to be used on one of the new ad campaigns. I took several different font designs and started to condense and scale the proportions in the hopes of finding several good solutions. They finally settled on a version of Times Roman, scaled horizontally to about 50 percent proportions. I liked the look so much that I later went back to the drawing board and refined the concept by adding slanted serifs and a varying alignment on all the letter forms giving the typeface a very casual and informal appearance. At about that time, I was reading a book by Jack Kerouac, and was so inspired by his writings on the ‘beat generation’ that I decided to name the font ‘Beatnik’. Afterwards, I added a set of true small capitals and old style figures. I'm currently working on additional weights and variations to expand this ‘hip’ new font series. Groovin' baby.

Beatnik Font families

The Beatnik includes the following font families:

• Beatnik
• Beatnik Sm Caps

Beatnik Preview

Here is a preview of how Beatnik will look. For more previews using your own text as an example, click here.