When it comes to planning Canada’s 150th birthday, it appears the federal government, like a couple about to wed and hoping to save money with cousin Brian’s DJ skills, is not above a freebie.
In December, when the government unveiled the Canada 150 typeface for 2017, it came to light on a typography message board that it was sourced for free.
“It was just so consistent with the thinking that started the logo contest that it makes me shake my head,” says Adrian Jean, president of Graphic Designers of Canada, referring to the student contest last year that yielded the celebration’s logo and drew the ire of designers. “It’s an embarrassing situation that the current government has to deal with, an embarrassing legacy the previous government left us.”
Last summer, the Canada 150 federal secretariat went looking for a distinctive Canadian font that jibed with the official logo and could be used in promotional materials for the 150th anniversary of Confederation. Since creating a font can take months or years, they needed something ready-made.
They found Raymond Larabie’s free font Mesmerize on his website.
Larabie grew up in the Ottawa Valley and studied animation at Sheridan College, where he also sat in on graphic design classes. While working in the video game industry in the 1990s, he taught himself font design as a hobby. Those early fonts were free because they were “terrible,” he says, but by 2001, he was creating fonts he could sell. He now runs his own company, Typodermic Fonts, where he sells typefaces and sometimes makes free ones “for kicks.”