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Melvastype

“I have always been interested in various forms of hand lettering, graffiti, sign painting and calligraphy,” Mika Melvas said in his Creative Characters interview. “As a kid I was very interested in graffiti. I drew and sketched it in my notebooks, and in art class my favorite tasks were always the ones that included some typographical elements. At some point I found calligraphy. There was something in calligraphy that fascinated me a lot. It is hard and demanding and needs regular training. And it is so pure; you can’t hide your mistakes or take short cuts. It is just forms and whitespace. I’m not a master calligrapher by any means but I like to do it and it makes me a better type designer and lettering artist.” For Mika, type design was a hobby long before it became the primary way he made his living. He began his career as an art director and graphic designer in advertising agencies and experimented with type on the side. Following his passion, Mika worked hard to guide his career towards becoming a full-time type designer and lettering artist. “I worked on my calligraphy and lettering a lot,” he said, “ and practiced vectorizing them. After a long period of hard training I was able to resign from my art director’s post and start my own foundry. I think it’s good to have knowledge and experience of graphic design — it has worked for me at least. It means that you have an understanding how your clients would use your fonts and what kind of expectations they have.” Since he first began selling his designs on MyFonts in 2011, the self-taught type designer has released over a dozen families. His library spans a typographic range from an extra bold slab serif, Ringa, to his more signature style of playful brush script fonts like Paintlay and Ahkio. “I think hand-sketching is a very important thing – at least for me — especially when you are doing a script font. You can’t beat the flow and rhythm one achieves with just pen and paper. I think you can focus better on the bigger picture; composition, flow and style, when doing things with just pen and paper. I easily rush to fine tune the details too early when using just a computer. Type design is a combination of creativity and engineering and that is very interesting to me. You get the best of both worlds.” For more on Mika, check out his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.The Premium foundry page can be viewed Here.