Funboy

I released Funboy on August 8, 2004, shortly after returning from TypeCon in San Francisco. While there, I noticed a style of narrow marker graffiti around the city that caught my attention. I didn’t take photos, but I practiced with a felt marker until I could capture the same flow and energy. The result was Funboy, a single-style typeface with thick strokes and a hand-drawn rhythm meant to echo that graffiti lettering.

To keep the lettering from looking mechanical, I built in contextual ligatures. These alternate pairs substituted automatically as you typed, creating the irregularity and momentum of real handwriting. The name came from Fun Boy Three, a band I had listened to in the 1980s, and I liked how it fit the playful tone of the design.

Funboy has always been a paid font; I never released a free version. On June 25, 2021, I issued an update that removed deprecated characters, fixed quotation marks, adjusted vertical metrics for better browser compatibility, and repaired an OpenType feature that had prevented some ligatures from working properly. The design itself has never been refined beyond those changes. I haven’t seen Funboy adopted in notable projects, but it stands as my attempt to translate a vivid, street-level lettering style into digital form.