Gaz

I released Gaz on August 25, 2009. The design was based on the stovepipe lettering styles common on mid-20th-century gasoline station signs. I wanted to capture their industrial look, with sharp angles and rounded corners. To reinforce that connection, I made the small caps slightly wider than the uppercase, a detail I had noticed in old sign lettering.

The family launched complete, with seven weights and italics, along with five textured “greasy” styles. To create those textures, I built a process in Photoshop using multiple layers of gritty bitmaps offset in different directions. Each character was copied over from FontLab, textured in Photoshop, converted to 1-bit, autotraced, and then manually cleaned up before being returned to FontLab. The system was inefficient but produced irregular, non-repeating textures that suited the design.

On May 25, 2021, I updated Gaz by removing deprecated characters, refining outlines, adding prime marks, expanding the OpenType fractions feature, and replacing reversed quotation marks. Version 2.1, released on October 31, 2024, reorganized the weight names: Book became Light, Light was renamed Extra-Light, Extra-Light was changed to Thin, and Ultra-Light was relabeled Hairline. Gaz has always been commercially licensed, with no free styles offered. I haven’t seen it adopted in notable projects, but for me it remains an exercise in translating the look of vintage industrial signage into a full digital family.