Jon Hicks, being a graphic designer and a Mac enthusiast, chose to memorialise his father in a very particular way:
Growing up I was subconsciously inspired by the different aspects of design that he introduced to me, from mid-century vinyl record covers to architecture and signage. In particular, his distinctive architect's handwriting was very evocative to me, and I decided I should try and capture it as a font. It could be something carrying his name that outlives him, and also something else to talk to him about.
Not something that everyone would care about,1 but Jon Hicks had the tools and the inclination, so why not?
- If it was, someone would be offering this sort of thing as an automated service you can access via an app, with the service using Machine Learning to extrapolate letters that weren't included in the sample and to equalise character sizes and so on. For a premium fee, the supplier would offer to lock the resulting font file down so that only the paying customer could use it (because clearly there's a risk of rampant forgery, or so we'd be warned.) Fidelity-wise, the results would very likely be considerably less good than what Jon Hicks can do manually, but in fairness that's not the sort of thing that it's easy to quantify. ↩