Ray Larabie

Raymond Larabie (born 1970 in Ottawa, Ontario) is a Canadian typographer and type designer. He founded Typodermic Fonts in 2001 and launched his Larabie Fonts free-font project in 1996. In 2008 he moved to Nagoya, Japan, incorporating the foundry in 2011. Larabie is best known for display typefaces such as Coolvetica and Pricedown (used for the Grand Theft Auto logo), and for releasing Canada 150 (2015), along with hundreds of his other older typefaces, into the public domain.

Biography and career

Larabie was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In his self-published autobiography, he states that he spent much of his childhood in the cottage country of the Ottawa Valley, an isolated environment that did not allow him to have traditional friendships or social activities, and thus spent much of his time learning computers and typography; he graduated from Sheridan College with a degree in classical animation, a field that was largely obsolete by the time he received his degree. Larabie was employed at Rockstar Canada 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, after having released a series of freeware fonts over the Internet under the brand LarabieFonts since 1996. Larabie worked as a video-game artist at Rockstar Toronto until 2002. While he did not design fonts for the company directly, his 1999 Pricedown font was later used in the logo of the Grand Theft Auto series. He moved to Nagoya, Japan in 2008 after marrying a woman from Nagoya; he maintains his Canadian citizenship , which is based on the logo for the international game show The Price Is Right. In addition to game shows, Larabie has also used 1960s and 1970s graphic logos, computer emulation, and other inspirations to design his fonts; most of his designs are display faces not meant for body text, with Larabie acknowledging that he had difficulties with italic type and, especially in his early career, had difficulties adapting katakana and hiragana to his designs.

Two of his typeface families, Marion and Superclarendon, are released with macOS. Larabie's "Canada 150" is an extended version of his previous font Mesmerize (in turn based on 1920s calligraphic German sans-serifs such as Semplicità, Nobel and Kabel) with Cyrillic and First Nations alphabets included; it was commissioned by the Government of Canada to be the official typeface for the country's sesquicentennial. The government paid him nothing for the custom work, which he subsequently placed into the public domain. He would proceed to release large portions of his Larabie Fonts library (inasmuch as he could, since some of the designs were derived from freeware that turned out to be copyrighted and thus could not be re-released), along with less successful designs for Typodermic, into the public domain in 2020, 2022 and 2024. and his desire to see his work used by multiple clients, which prompted him to price his fonts affordablyly, provide customization services and increase his attention to detail in regard to how a font looks on a screen as opposed to print. other professional designers (among them Graphics Designers of Canada president Adrian Jean and competing type designer Rod McDonald) took particular umbrage at Canada 150, arguing that the government should have paid for a professionally drawn type because it had the money to do so, because not doing so would be a vote of no confidence in up-and-coming Canadian designers, and that professional designers would publish a superior product. He noted that when he had previously attended typography conferences, he had received the cold shoulder from attendees who felt he was threatening their business. Permanence was chosen for the 2023 reissue of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. Sinzano was used in King's Crown organic tea packaging. Hoverunit appeared in the bilingual monograph Dia Al-Azzawi, and Carouselambra was used in posters for Amsterdam's Freak Festival.

Notable Typefaces Coolvetica (1999) – a 1970s–style display font with tight kerning and decorative curls; widely used in packaging and games. Superclarendon (2007) – slab-serif font bundled with macOS. Neuropol—a modified version of which was used in the wordmark for the 2006 Winter Olympics Stereofidelic – freeware typeface inspired by 1960s lounge records Blue Highway, based upon the American highway sign typeface and its commercial counterpart Expressway Permanence – a slab serif inspired by the original 1970s Future Shock cover; later used on its 2023 reissue. Ethnocentric

Samples