Ray Larabie

Ray Larabie (born 1970 in Ottawa, Ontario) is a designer of computer TrueType and OpenType fonts. Beginning in 1996, Larabie distributed his designs over the internet as freeware, operating as his own independent type foundry LarabieFonts.^[1]

Larabie became interested in fonts in the early 1970s when his grandmother gave him sheets of Letraset. He eventually became familiar with typefaces, and could identify hundreds of fonts by name. He began creating typefaces with pen and paper and later, on his first computer, a TRS-80.

Larabie was employed at Rockstar Toronto and had contributed his designs to multiple video game titles, including the hit series' Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne, before he quit the company in 2002 to focus full-time on type design.

List of Larabie Fonts

Many of his designs were inspired by corporate and rock band logos, whose names paid sly tribute to their sources:

• Crystal Radio Kit[1] - From the 1970s-vintage RadioShack logo and named for a product once sold by that retailer.^[2]
• Chinese Rocks[2] - Inspired by lettering on a shipping carton of Chinese-made dinnerware and named for the 1977 punk rock song about heroin addiction.
• Gyparody[3] - based on the well-known television quiz show Jeopardy!.
• Joystix[4] - This font is very similar to the font used in early video games, notably Pac-Man, Galaga, and Super Mario Bros.. In the 1980s it was used throughout such games, but by 1995 the font had been relegated to menu screens and story lines that took place between levels.
• King Richard[5] - From the 1970s-vintage Plymouth logo. It is named for a nickname of racer Richard Petty who raced Plymouths for much of his career.
• Pricedown[6] - based on the logo of the 1972-to-present game show The Price Is Right and made famous as the main font used by the Grand Theft Auto video game series.
• Zrnic[7] - based on the original logo for the PlayStation.
• Sudbury Basin[8] - Named for the Sudbury Basin, a major mining area in Ontario, and based on the angular lettering of Inco's corporate logo.
• Zip'N'Stripz - based on the font used on the titling of the chicken snack of the same name. Ray also created their slogan, "Zip A Strip!"
• Symbol - A multi-use font which contains a wide variety of symbols used for computers/computing. Based on symbols from the 1960s-present.
• Stereofidelic - based on the lounge record from the 1960s.

Other Larabie fonts, such as Degrassi[9] and Electroharmonix[10], were creations of Ray Larabie’s own imagination. Early designs were typically science fiction, futurist and techno-oriented, but he eventually produced fonts in a wide variety of styles, including pop culture, 1970s retro, decorative, handwritten, experimental and novelty faces. This visibility lead to Larabie's designs becoming commonly used in advertising, in particular within the music and clothing industries.

Larabie released over 400 freeware fonts before announcing in 2001 that he would focus exclusively on commercial fonts that he sold through his new independent type foundry Typodermic.^[3]

See also

• List of freeware type designers

External links

• Ray Larabie at MobyGames
• Typodermic Fonts

References