Welcome to the Wingsart Newsletter – A Holiday Special!

Enjoy the newsletter! Please email your letters and questions to: newsletter@wingsart.studio.

Sentimental Feeling is a nostalgic script font that aims to capture the festive magic of Christmas with a retro design inspired by 1950s magazine editorials, classic movies and real, hand-written signatures.

It’s a traditional design with a smooth brush-like flow and subtle human imperfections. Equally at home singing carols, sharing Xmas Eve stories or serving cocktails at your New Years party. It includes a complete set of uppercase and lowercase characters, plus numerals, punctuation, language support, symbols, alternatives, custom ligatures, underlines, and a selection of festive clipart (including everything you might need to re-create the examples seen in my visuals).

Add it to your toolbox from just $2 and create the perfect Christmas gifts and stationery products, ads, titles and much more! Remember, use code “Christmasbonus” for an amazing 90% off!

Raise a glass to this vintage inspired Art Deco header font! This first edition of New Year Deco is the introduction to an experimental design that I plan to evolve into the ultimate in Art Deco fonts.

Starting with 4 alternative styles with varying degrees of decorative flourish, this all-caps design is tailor-made for invitations, award ceremonies, elegant title designs and logos. It includes unique uppercase and lowercase characters, along with numerals, punctuation and language support. And also includes a variety of illustrated symbols, underlines and icons for an extra graphic touch.

For the future development of this font I encourage customers to contact me with suggestions and requests. If you would like to see a bolder, thinner, fatter, taller or wider version, contact me and I’ll add it to the next update!

For customers looking to replicate the look in my visuals, I’ve made a simple design template for After Effects, Photoshop and Affinity Photo 2. Available as a free extra to download via the link in the enclosed PDF.

I have a theory that all creative people are essentially hoarders. Collectors of ephemera that define our own personal taste. At first inconsequential, yet refined over a lifetime of found objects, it develops our own unique perspective that feeds the work we create, becoming an essential asset for any designer.

With respect to media, streaming technology has aimed to replace ownership with the convenient access to everything, everywhere, all at once; and I fear something human is lost in this apparent advantage. Consider for a moment trying to find something ‘good’ to watch on Netflix. Am I alone in finding it a passive, endless click of homogenous thumbnails? It’s made so frustrating that you too often settle with the algorithmically selected choice that was on the front page anyway.

At the beginning of the pandemic I stared work on my Video Store Collection of fonts. This project was deeply inspired by memories of Friday nights browsing the shelves in the local video store, letting all of that amazing poster art and eye-popping typography barter for my £1.50. I can’t imagine the designers of tomorrow will rap nostalgic about those amazing Netflix thumbnails. The incentive on streamers is to be first, not findable; leaving less room for engaging design, resulting in a platform where everything often looks the same.

In the process of researching some 80s themed fonts, I bought a few old ex-rental VHS tapes from eBay. Firstly, I was amazed at how much much these were selling for; but second, while holding a dusty copy of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in my hands (one of those big clamshell boxes), I could feel the life that this old tape had lived. Rough corners, worn out price tags, hand-written notes on the box, and the faint smell of old cigarettes that took me straight back to that dirty, alive and bustling shop.

This did in fact spark an obsessive hunt for more VHS boxes with interesting covers, which ultimately became a shrine in the corner of my studio, that I’ll often just stop and browse in a moment of creative block. And I can say the same for all of my books, CDs, Vinyls, Blu Rays and vintage magazines that are filling up the space around me. All of it is reference that informs my work. A process of self-curation that makes my interpretation of an idea different to yours, with more inherent value once it’s shaped into a new piece of work. Surely if we all just consume what’s easy, never look beyond Google, or even rely on AI to dictate our work, won’t that make us all the same, and boring?

My point is that I collect stuff because it’s a self-conscious thought process. I don’t allow myself to be led by the next trend, only what sparks my interest at the time. A lot of modern movies feel very temporary and throw-away because they’re made to meet a moment, bypassing crucial development stages in the pursuit of content. If we want to enjoy truly unique content that can engage and surprise us, we all need to follow our own personal taste. And that’s why I collect.