Wellbutrin font

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Karen Clemens lives in Bruges, Belgium. She's 34 years old, has 4 kids, employs 14 people in her own design firm, sleeps 3 hours a day, likes bloody steak, and is happier than a clam buried in the sand. She likes to call herself an "expat", which is short for ex-patriot. Karen was born and bread in Vancouver, Canada. She met her husband some 12 years ago, then moved with him to Belgium a couple years later.

The first few letters of Welbutrin didn't look anything like they do now. It originally started as an experiment with bitmaps, where Karen turned a 12 point bitmap version of Helvetica Round into scalable outlines. At 12 points the font was certainly Helvetica Round, but at 70 and above, it looked like a blown-up version of what you see on your cell phone screen. She was impressed by that and asked me to help her out with it. I said no way, but a sample of some of her letters at 130 points gave me an idea: what if the characters were all made of rounded rectangles, like the ones that can so easily be made with the Illustrator tool?

Karen liked the idea. We exchanged grids and started working, at the pace of 2 hours a day. A couple weeks later we realized that the grids we were using were pretty good for weights of over 100 points, but really bad for anything under 70 points. So I regridded and we redrew everything while keeping in mind that we wanted this font to look as good as a rounded techno can at 14 points.

Karen wants to dedicate this to Kelly, her 5 year old kid.
I want to dedicate this to the guy from Neuropolis, Ray Larabie, the man who for 4 years now has kept on continuing the Rakowski revolution, even long after Rakowski himself sold out.

Keep on shocking in the free world.

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