Working Grunge Fonts Into Your Design

Now that you've found all these fun fonts, what are you going to do with them? Working them into traditional design can be difficult, so it's time to learn about overall grunge design. If you think it's all about simply dirt and darkness this article should set you straight. Sometimes just a few pieces of grunge can make your bright design more realistic and interesting.

Along with your fonts, you're going to want to pick up some grunge brushes to create your very own grunge backgrounds. But it's much more fun to create your own using this tutorial. Or this one. Or this one. You get the idea.

Another excellent use of these new brushes is to distress your own type. In Photoshop or an equivalent image editor, place your type on its own layer. Paint on a mask with your new brush, or use the eraser tool set to your brush and single-click the brush over the sections you want to distressed with the opacity set to differing levels. The airbrush tool also renders interesting results, as does the use of several different brushes over one typeface.

Grunge Font Foundries

Here are some of my favorite repositories grunge fonts:

• Font Squirrel
  Font Squirrel tops my list because aside from providing quality fonts, it provides them all free of cost and with a commercial license. In a time when copyright law and intellectual property is in continual flux, it is invaluable for me to be able to browse a site and know that anything I see I can download and use without further rigamarole.


• Misprinted Type
  Digital artist, recife, has a nice collection of grunge fonts he designed that he both sells and gives away free. It's not extensive by any means, but it is good quality, original stuff.


• Fontspace, 1001Fonts, DaFont
  Commercial licenses are harder to come by at these font megasites, but they always have a wide selection.
  
  
• InstantShift and other online webmags
  To keep their blog traffic up, web magazines often run best of or feature lists like the one linked above. Subscride ot the rss feed of a few and watch for these lists to come out.
  
  

Grunge Fonts in Modern Branding

You'd think that dirty, distressed, and practically illegible fonts wouldn't be popular in the commercial world.

You'd be wrong.

In a world where everyone wants to be "edgy," grunge fonts have become the new goto typeface for breaking out your new product or rebranding your old one. From clothing companies to pop stars to evangelical Christian culture, grunge fonts have emerged from the punk rock basement and taken over the mainstream. Here's just a few examples:

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This heavyweight in the worlds of both branded clothing and MMA showcases uses a thick-stemmed font with a bracketed light serif for its main logo, distressing it with some small to medium smudges. Coupling this with graphics thickly laden with deathly or fantastic images, gives them a downright "Goth" feel.

When they want to get even more grungy, they do a similar, but more intense stressing of a blackletter font for some medieval grunge action.






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Beyonce's logo should probably be considered an individual piece of art, rather than a font family, but I use it as an example of the far reach of grunge fonts because it shares two important characteristics with Affliction and a number of other "edgy" branding attempts.

1. Distressing. Though the distressing is more floral than chaotic in Beyonce's logo, it is definitely a bit dirtier than a plain floarl motif would be.
2. Fraktur Font. Many grunge fonts are based on Blackletter typefaces, with the Fraktur family being a very popular choice.

And finally, an obversation from Stuff Christian Culture Likes where it is noted that "Christian items marketed to teens usually use an "extreme," "edgy" or "grunge" font."

Nothing to do with Grunge Fonts but...

Apparently, this is what letters are made of. Diane, why haven't you told us this?

Where did these ugly fonts come from?

It is difficult to pinpoint where and when the first "grunge" font was used, and who first used it. But signs point to surfer turned graphic designer, David Carson, who was known as the "Father of Grunge." His signature distorted and often illegible style was loved and hated in nearly equal measures in the 90's. In his magazine, Ray Gun, he once set an entire interview he disliked in the Dingbat typeface. In 1993, he opened the type foundry, Garage Fonts, that featured many of the type styles he was using in Ray Gun. Today, it has over 750 fonts by numerous different designers.


Some grunge examples from Garage Fonts:




David Carson may not be the first person to ever use a distressed font, or create something dark and beautiful with typography, but he may be where the name and the style got its identity.

Grunge Fonts

Grunge fonts are a loosely defined group of fonts that encourage designers to break out of "clean" design and create something dirty. Distressed, uneven, incomplete--grunge fonts aren't intended to be pretty, and oftentimes aren't even useful.

But they do make a statement.

And if the intention of good typography is to match the medium to the message, than having a few quality grunge fonts in your bag of design tricks is essential. In this blog, I'll be talking about the history of grunge fonts, some good foundries for acquiring them, and even how to make your own. I'll probably delve into some overall grunge concepts as well, and talk about using grunge fonts in logo design.