Parkmerced

Parkmerced is a custom font designed from scratch, beginning with pencil sketches and ending with an installable font that can be used in any program, on any platform. Inspired by the San Francisco neighborhood after which it is named, Parkmerced is a metropolitan garden community designed and built in the 1920s.

Parkmerced (the font) is also heavily influenced by Paul Renner’s Futura, which was designed during the same modernist period and shares the neighborhood’s aesthetic features: strong contrast, geometric rigidity.

The counters of the R and P match, as do the C, O, and Q. The M and W are simply flipped, and most numerals are lobed. Weight contrast between horizontal and vertical is exaggerated.

To display Parkmerced’s features and show it in action, I prepared a Type Specimen Book.

The book contains detailed diagrams of the most exemplary letters, a full walkthrough of my design process, and a series of samples showing how Parkmerced might be used in logos, packaging, stationery, or signage.

Click the link below to view the Type Specimen Book in PDF form.

Parkmerced was supposed to be the perfect garden suburb. Nestled between San Francisco’s Holloway Hills and Lake Merced, this ambitious “Planned Garden Community” was to be an upper-middle-class cloister, several steps up from the Hoovervilles and Levittowns which soon began to dominate the rest of the country.

On a map, the radial layout of the complex and the frequent roundabouts foreshadow circular windows and arches. The four Parkmerced towers jut assumingly from the checkered pastel apartments, and trees line every lane, yard, and cranny.