Made with FontLab: Nate Piekos
If you’ve read a comic in the last twenty years, you’ve read Blambot. Nate Piekos’s foundry has supplied the lettering fonts for an absurd share of the medium — the dialogue balloons, the SFX, the display titles. Five of his Blambot families sit in the public made-with-fontlab gallery, all drawn in FontLab 7.
Comic lettering fonts have a specific brief that text fonts don’t: they must read fast, in tight balloons, at small sizes on cheap paper or backlit screens, alongside artwork that’s always more visually demanding than they are. Get the rhythm wrong and the page reads stiff. Piekos has been getting that rhythm right for long enough that “Blambot fonts” is functionally a generic term in the trade.
His public testimonial is short and on-topic. After waiting years for one specific feature:
I’m so freaking happy. Glorious, glorious Dark Mode at last. My eyes thank you, FontLab! (…)
I asked for this, and FontLab is delivering. Can’t get better customer relations than that.
— Nate Piekos, Blambot
Dark mode looks trivial as a feature on a release-notes page. It is not trivial when you spend nine hours a day staring at a glyph window. The detail worth keeping from Piekos’s note is the second sentence: “I asked for this, and FontLab is delivering.” That’s the relationship a one-person foundry actually needs from its tools — the guarantee that a feature request is heard, prioritised, and shipped. Comics is a genre where the lettering studio is one person at a desk; that person cannot afford to fork the toolchain when the editor stops listening.
The Blambot catalogue on the gallery — Budrick BB, Inkcantation BB, Ready for Anything BB, Shrunken Head BB, Thunderclap BB — covers the genre’s working ranges: a sturdy dialogue letterer, an ink-saturated horror display, a brassy action display, a heavy display headline, a thunderous SFX font. All five out of one studio, in one editor, with one consistent set of metrics across the family.
The way Piekos works is the case for FontLab in the kind of genre work that quietly fills the world: not the prestige Latin text family that gets the design awards, but the high-volume working catalogue that lives inside thousands of comics and ends up everywhere readers look.
More from Nate Piekos¶
- Budrick BB — Blambot
- Inkcantation BB — Blambot
- Ready for Anything BB — Blambot
- Shrunken Head BB — Blambot
- Thunderclap BB — Blambot