Nick Curtis isn’t a name you see next to Brad Pitt or Will Smith on the headlines of tabloids, but the gentleman has been somewhat quietly helping designers for years, and I’d like to sort of introduce him here by way of his work.

Nick designs typefaces. Specifically, he has designed a positively huge backlog of digital typefaces that all have a common thread: they look homey and familiar and they are perhaps “Retro at its Best”.

I had the honor of communicating with him a few years ago about offering one or two samples of his font collection—for free, nothing in it for him—for the Xara Official Guide. He said ”yes” and went so far as to brand special editions of five typeface with the Xara logo hidden in an extended character register.

It really broke my heart to learn from Nick that he’d stopped making typefaces for the fun of it, and is now only a commercial vendor you can buy from at Fonts.com. Why the change? Because low-lives, real Web scum, had collected all his free fonts not once, but several times, and were selling his free fonts on a CD.

The good news is that many, many of his “classic” typefaces have resurfaced on dafont.com. I recommend that you run, don’t walk to the link here, and check out some of Mr. Curtis’ incredible mastery of typeset communications.

Nick Curtis' free fonts on Dafont.com

Here’s an example of what I’ll call an “Instant logo”. Nick’s “Creampuff” font can be enveloped in Xara and still maintains a lot of its character and legibility.

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There are so many typefaces that are expensive commercial reworks of originals that were designed centuries ago. It’s a privilege to have virtually met a living artist in this trade who expressed himself in such a sharing way! If you like his free work, perhaps you'll consider turning to his $$$ work the next time you need a unique typeface for a paying gig, huh?

My Best,

—Gary