BLKBK is a graphic design studio specializing in type, custom fonts, brand identity, and design for print and web.
Since 2013, BLKBK has designed script-based fonts guided by a non-trivial understanding that letters mean something. Besides the sounds letters designate, outside the semantics of letters assembled into words, and beyond the precise messages we communicate through sentences or paragraphs, there’s a bundle of extra-literate meaning in the way letters look. When BLKBK sets brush to paper, it’s with a sensitivity to these meanings: the urgency behind a dry brush, the assertion of every angle, and the kindness in a curve.
This philosophy underpins a century of inspiration, from hand-painted signs, through album art and VHS sleeves, and has found a new home in our digital era. BLKBK’s vision and technical savvy has liberated the script from the hand of the scribe, packaging these scripts in over 200 complete fonts for the ready use of brands and designers around the world.
There’s a brick wall in our hometown, next to a parking lot. It’s a lot like a lot of places, in a lot of places. Three floors up, an old hand-painted sign still advertises Coca-Cola after all these years. Everything below that is blank.
Artists might see this expanse of beige brick as a blank slate. To their folly: this expanse is already painted, beige to match the bricks. Beneath, the buffed works of successive artists committed to this void testify that the void is the point: we aren’t supposed to see this wall. We never were. Decades ago a building blocked it from view, only the cola advertisement peaking out above. Its blank expanse asked nothing because behind the vitality of uses offered by a building, it didn’t exist. That building fell under the weight of new technology and changing societal values, giving an old space a new purpose, and exposing a wall without one.
Growing up straddling eras is like that. Change the means of creation, publishing, and distribution, and within an adolescence generations of creation are reduced to a box of home video cassettes, collecting dust in an attic. But unlike the building, which exists only in memories and photographs, its homes and businesses lost forever, style is forever, and Rad will Stay Rad.
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