ITC Tickle and ITC Tickle Too
When Patricia Lillie was growing up, she thought the coolest thing in the world would be finding her own name listed in a library catalog. The fantasy came true in 1986 when her first children’s book was published. Five more followed.
The thrill of seeing her work on library shelves hasn’t abated, but today, Lillie is just as likely to see one of her typefaces on the cover of a book. She has created several display faces and image fonts. “My first typeface designs were based on lettering I’d done while working for a library, doing graphics work for the children’s section,” she explains. “I currently do a lot of web design, but type is my favorite thing.”
The Tickles (ITC Tickle and ITC Tickle Too) are Lillie’s first ITC typeface releases. “I was playing around with a Sharpie marker one day and liked the way the letters looked,” she recalls. “I started redoing the letters from scratch in Fontographer to see what developed, and liked those letters too.”
ITC Tickle is a bi-form font (with both cap and lowercase letters of the same size) that clearly breaks a typographic rule or two. ITC Tickle Too has the same basic lettershapes, but they’ve grown clusters of stipples that give a three-dimensional quality to the design. The result is a friendly, offbeat display family that’s guaranteed to add a giggle to your work.
ITC Hedera
ITC Hedera’s roots can be traced to a suite of initials intended for book design. Olivera Stojadinovic, the face’s designer, made the first sketches for the initials with a handmade tool consisting of two flexible metal strips tied to a wooden handle. This makeshift pen created the distinctive uneven double strokes of the letterforms.
Stojadinovic says that she tried to keep the original flavor of the sketches in the finished font. “Stroke roughness has been preserved in final execution, though the characters had some cleaning and polishing,” she notes. Based on Renaissance letterforms, ITC Hedera has a classical quality that complements its calligraphic exuberance.
The name Hedera? According to Stojadinovic, “It’s the name of a common ivy. I chose it because of the organic image of the character strokes, which, to me, resemble shapes from nature’s leaves or stems of plants.” Rough-hewn yet elegant, ITC Hedera is an exceptional display design.