Clarke is a freelance designer who specialises in illustrative typography. His work often involves blending imagery and lettering to create beautifully crafted, visual type. This approach has found a very specific niche in companies such as branding agencies, book publishers and retailers. They offer beautiful stand out additions to brands, book covers or shops.
He has dedicated a lot of time in his life to developing his range of high quality typefaces, some more generic type faces can be found on adobe fonts. Three of the four available types would be best suited for headings as they would be hard to read as large blocks of body type. The serif type named span, would be able to be used for body copy due to its simple serif nature and how it is highly readable. These fonts are well crafted, and would be able to be used in a variety of situations.
Jamie Clarke, while now specialising in type and typography, started out in web design. He worked for a few agencies before joining Microsoft, where he became Head of Design for their online division across Europe. He later left this role and cofounded one of the UK’s top digital agencies, where he worked with a range of well-known media and technology clients.
While at the agency his love for typography restarted and he started a popular typography blog, called Type Worship (https://blog.8faces.com/). After decade he sold the agency and refocused entirely on type and lettering, expanding his skills at the University of Reading studying type design and taking various courses such as letterpress printing.
Currently Clarke splits his time between type projects and lettering commissions.
On his website he shows the process of creating his type and the area surrounding it, showing how he starts on paper and with every sketch gets closer to the final version. I used ’The Paris Mysteries’ as my example due to the layering of elements including type, bordering and illustration. I found it highly interesting how Clarke can merge these three separate elements together seamlessly.
In the image below we can see the detail in Clarke's Work. Using line to build up the 3D element of the type, bordering and shadowing. Looking at Clarke's work takes me back to basics, yet his work is very complex, it is a reminder that everything has to start somewhere, with dot, line and plane. This is something I will look at going forward and possibly could be a focus for my prototype and publication, how designs can be built up by layering type and other elements such as dot, line and plane.
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