With extenders like swizzle sticks, ITC Pious Henry looks like it ought to come with cocktail onions. The rough, bouncy, narrow-shouldered letters would look right at home in a cartoon about a 1959 cocktail-lounge crooner.
South Carolina designer Eric Stevens says, however, that for him Pious Henry evokes a feeling of the rural South.
"Maybe it's a nave quality that belongs on a 'Boiled Peanuts' sign," he says.
The underlying highly condensed sans serif form has been roughed up, with irregular edges and constantly changing x-heights, angles, and baselines.
The effect is a typeface that seems to dance on the page - or the screen.
And the odd name? Stevens explains that once he's got the basic letterforms down in a design, "I start to compose sample words and phrases so I can see how the typeface is developing, looking for potential problems and such." He hates to let the computer name a font file "Untitled-1," so he let free association come up with a name.
"Pious Henry" was one of those phrases, and it stuck.
