Brad Nelson
Back around 1995 after writing and designing a B-Movie Magazine for a few years I became tired of looking for specific genre type styles, so I finally decided to create my own. I drew up some ideas, and started scanning, auto-tracing and fighting the font creation software beast. There's a hell of a lot of work drawing and creating digital fonts, that one doesn't realize until one creates one oneself. Display faces take a long time, but a text face with all the kerning, spacing and metrics could take years! I hold in high regard the great type designer with that kind of patience, and idle time.
Originally I chose the name "Hammer Fonts", because most of the ideas were from seeing old gothic style horror movies. Hammer Film Studios in London in particular, and The TOHO film company of Japan has also been a big inspiration for cool typefaces. Of course I dropped the name "Hammer", and created the now legendary Brain Eaters Font Co brand name. The name Brain Eaters Font Co. is inspired from the fantastic B&W sci-fi/horror movie from the 50's entitled "The Brain Eaters" (itself a knock-off of a book from 1951 "the Puppet Masters" by Robert Heinlen). The premise of the Brain Eaters movie is this: Parasites from innerspace attach themselves to the back of the hosts neck and control them to do their evil bidding & bonding! Kinda similar to my own personal goal, fonts based on B-Movies, Horror, Sci-Fi, Exploitation and other Trash, the parasites of society!
I studied Graphic design in Utah, and learned the esoteric/secret rights of fontography and polygamy in one fell swoop. Where I lay my head is where I call home, Doctor or a lawyer I'll never be, the life of a fontographer is the only one for me...
[Brad Nelson, June 2007]
