Ray Larabie

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Raymond Larabie (born 1970) is a Canadian designer of TrueType and OpenType computer fonts. He owns Typodermic Fonts type foundry, which distributes both commercially licensed and shareware/freeware fonts.

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Larabie was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In his self-published autobiography, he states that he graduated from Sheridan College with a degree in classical animation, a field that was largely obsolete by the time he received his degree.^[1] 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.^[2] Larabie recalled an incident in which Rockstar had used his Pricedown font for the Grand Theft Auto logo, completely unaware that its designer was their own employee.^[1] He moved to Nagoya, Japan in 2008, maintaining his Canadian citizenship^[1] and returning to the country briefly in 2017 to celebrate its sesquicentennial.^[3]

Larabie primarily specializes in novelty typefaces that are intended for use in desktop publishing and graphic design. The logo for Grand Theft Auto, for instance, uses Larabie's Pricedown font, which is based on the logo for the international game show The Price Is Right, as well as for the Disney animated series Fillmore!. 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.^[1] He is particularly known for his “ubiquitous futuristic and sci-fi fonts”; Larabie specialized in that style early in his career because he felt that, other than a few examples such as Bank Gothic, Microgramma and Eurostile, the market for that style was underserved.^[4]

Two of his typeface families, Marion and Superclarendon, are released with macOS.^[5][6] 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 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,^[7] 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.^[8][1]

Larabie has drawn controversy for releasing fonts freely; 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.^[3] Larabie responded to the criticism by noting that he appreciated that Canada had chosen a work by a Canadian artist (contrasting it with the use of Helvetica, of Swiss origin, on Canadian money) and said "You can’t just throw a couple hundred grand at a problem and that’s the solution for every problem."^[3] 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.^[3] In another case, attorneys for Metallica sent Larabie a cease and desist order over one of his freeware fonts, Pastor of Muppets, for having taken letter designs from Metallica's wordmark; though Larabie maintained that, as Americans, they could not claim copyright over character designs as they did not meet a threshold of originality, he complied with the order (also noting that the use of the Muppets name could have drawn further trademark challenges), but found that the font had been too widely distributed to withdraw it from all the sites that had begun distributing it. Metallica never pressed any further action and Larabie, in his autobiography, stated that he wanted nothing further to do with the font and would never release it again.^[1]

• Coolvetica—an eccentric neo-grotesque sans-serif based on Chalet and 1970s Helvetica, Larabie's most popular font
• Foo—used for Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (PD)^[8]
• Neuropol—a modified version of which was used in the wordmark for the 2006 Winter Olympics^[9] (PD)^[8]
• Pricedown—used for the logo of Grand Theft Auto. Based upon Pinto Flare.^[10]
• Stereofidelic (PD)^[8]
• Mesmerize (PD)^[8]
• Kawashiro Gothic, Japanese gothic typeface based on the Mesmerize typeface
• Canada 1500, based on the Mesmerize typeface; supports Greek, Cyrillic, Vietnamese, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics^[11] (PD)^[8]
• Blue Highway, based upon the American highway sign typeface (PD)^[8] and its commercial counterpart Expressway
• Ethnocentric

• Open-source Unicode typefaces
• List of type designers
• Cartier (typeface)

• Ray Larabie at MobyGames
• Typodermic Fonts
• Typodermic on MyFonts
• Typodermic on Fontspring
• Ray Larabie at IMDb