Mandevilla is a tropical, flowering vine — and the name of a font I designed ages ago — back in 2012! It started as it usually does, with me and my sketchbook, sitting on the couch, late at night, just doodling and not expecting anything from the practice. As I came up with some fun illustrations, I started thinking about letters to match its simplicity and was caught up by a memory of my youth. A popular lettering style, when I was a teenager and young adult, was stick letters with a ball at the ends of the letters for a bit of decoration. How about something like that? A simple sans fancified with ball terminals and some really unique looking uppercase letters?
And so as I continued sketching, I took an unusual approach. I started out by designing the uppercase letters first, reasoning that the lowercase would have the most simplistic forms and they’d be set off with a more intricate uppercase form that would really add personality to a word or phrase. There were a lot of possibilities with this design, so, as per usual for me, there are a ton of alternate letterforms found in this font. Especially in the uppercase.
When I started working on designs for jewelry, I knew that Mandevilla had to be one of the first designs to be made and sold. It’s highly stylized but simple — two oftentimes contradictory things to achieve in design. It’s one of my favorite designs and I particularly the letters A, B and M. And H, L, O, Q (definitely the Q!) and the W. Okay, I like them all! Hopefully you do too!
