Guest Designer Interview: Missy Meyer Art & Fonts

Join me as we chat with our Club Chaos featured designer.

We celebrate community over competition in this space and love to showcase designers doing amazing things with their talents.  In this month’s guest designer feature we are highlighting Missy from Missy Meyer Arts & Fonts.

This featured guest designer graciously provided our members with one of her best selling fonts. You can see the font below.

Inside Club Chaos, members are exposed to tons of different artists and get to experience a wide variety of styles and tastes.  Club Chaos is a crafting sisterhood and crafting home, not just a place to download files.

Please note that this post contains affiliate links.

Read on to meet our featured designer of the month and learn about Missy’s creative process, her current projects, and so much more!

Hey Missy!  Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m in my early 50s (Gen X represent!) and I’ve been an artist and designer for most of my working life, though usually as a side gig. I’ve been making fonts casually for about 20 years, and I’ve been professionally making fonts to sell since 2016.

My day jobs have run the gamut from pizza chef to bookkeeper to casino dealer to paralegal. Plus a stint as an actor and comedic improviser at Walt Disney World! It’s … a very weird work history.

I’m originally from Seattle, Washington. I lived in Orlando, Florida for about 9 years, then another 9 or so in Phoenix, Arizona. In early 2023, my husband and I and our two cats moved to Portugal. We both work for ourselves, and we can do that from anywhere. So when we decided we didn’t want to spend another summer in Arizona, we chose to be really bold and move to Europe, before we’re too old for a big adventure.

I also fulfilled a lifelong dream and lost on Jeopardy! In 2017.

Could you please share a little about the significance of where your business name comes from?

It’s just my name, with “Fonts” or “Designs” thrown on at the end, depending on what I’m working on. When I got serious about designing and selling fonts, it didn’t even occur to me to come up with a company name!

How did you first get into designing?

I was one of those kids who was always drawing and doodling. When we got the Apple II computer in the mid-’80s, we had The Print Shop software for it, so I could make greeting cards and banners and newsletters. (Holy moly, I’ve been designing graphics on computers for 40 years?)

I moved on to early versions of Photoshop, and eventually Illustrator for vector work. I rarely ever draw on paper anymore; it’s all either on the iPad in Procreate or on my computer using a graphics tablet.

What is your favorite type of design to create?

The boring answer would be “fonts,” but … hmm, yeah, it’s fonts.  It’s this magical combination of art and math and coding.  I get to draw the letters, but I also get to work with nodes and curves and proportions, and I get to write some custom code every time.

Plus, fonts have helped me learn new things!  I taught myself how to read both the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, so I could create those characters with more confidence.

Do you prefer designing or making the actual item?

I’m absolutely in the designing camp. I’ve tried to make physical crafts many times, but all of the clutter and materials and storage needs makes me uptight. 😆 (And yet, I’m thinking about getting a new sewing machine over here, since I had to sell off my old one before we moved! But that would be more to make clothes than crafts.)

How would you describe your style?

Fun, cute, and clean.  When I was first teaching myself how to design fonts, I’d never even heard of Cricut or Silhouette or any of those things. I was designing fonts for print, because that was the only use for fonts I knew about. (“Weeding? What the heck does that mean?”)

As soon as I learned about cutting machines and their particular needs, I started making sure that my fonts would be clean and easy to cut. I specialized in handwriting fonts for a while, but in the last few years that seems to be what everyone is doing, so I’ve made a pivot more into more slab serifs and sans-serifs.

What’s something you wish you knew when you first started designing or creating?

That pushing myself too hard and fast would lead to burnout!  In 2016 and 2017, I made more than 30 fonts each year. I slowed down in 2018 and 2019, but I really needed to just take a break. The past couple of years, I’ve only put out a handful of fonts each year. It was actually a blessing that I had to take 6 months off from fonts in order to organize and execute an international move – now that I’m settled on the other end, I’m excited to make fonts again.

Who or what inspires you?

Is it a bit cliché to say “the world around me”?  I drive my husband nuts because I’m always pulling out my phone to take pictures of signs and labels and other lettering. Sometimes it’s even just one letter that someone has written somewhere, and I can picture additional letters in that family.

What does a typical day or week look like for you behind the scenes?

I’m usually awake earlier than I’d like (thanks to cats stomping on my head), and then delayed starting work (thanks to cats stomping on my desk). Once I get going, it might be working on my current in-progress font, drawing my webcomic or other art, building cut files (I’m working on expanding that part of my business), or writing blog posts.  I try to change it up so I’m never doing the same thing two days in a row; if I’m feeling stuck in a rut on one thing, I know that the next day will be something different.

What’s your most popular item in your shop or on your blog?

My Pinsetter Font. I swear, my tombstone is going to be carved in Pinsetter.  Though my single-line fonts have been picking up speed; there still aren’t a ton of those out there, because they’re a gigantic pain in the rear to create, and it takes some specialty skills to make them.

When you aren’t designing what can we find you doing?

Blogging about intellectual property. Moving cats off of whatever I’m doing.  Reading – I’m a huge fiction reader, usually rom-coms and science fiction/fantasy. Walking everywhere, now that I live in a place where I don’t need a car. Learning something new on YouTube.

What is your favorite food?

Single ingredient? Cheddar cheese. Complete dish? Probably spaghetti Bolognese.

If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?

One of my cats. These two are spoiled rotten!

What’s next for you?

More fonts! I’m also working on having more of a cut files presence. Maybe I’ll start to dip my toe into sublimation designs. 

As far as non-work stuff, now that we have our residency in Portugal, we can start traveling. (Which means more signs in more languages that I can take pictures of for inspiration!)

Where can we find you online?

My main site is missymeyer.com; you can find links from there to pretty much everything else I do. All of the pages in the Premium Fonts section have outbound links to the shops where those fonts are sold. I also have a bunch of freebie fonts there!

Holiday Doodles is my daily webcomic, which is getting all-new material for 2023.

TradeSnark is where I moan and groan about trademarks and other IP, with a regular schedule of 3 posts per week covering newly registered trademarks and new applications.

And I’ve written a couple of rom-com superhero novels! You can find them at my Amazon author page.

Thank you so much Missy for being our featured guest designer this month inside of Club Chaos.  We appreciate you taking some time to chat with us and share a little bit of the behind the scenes.  It has been so fun to learn a little bit about you and about your process.  Also a big thanks to our Chaos community for cheering her on!

Check out the font that Club Chaos members get to sample this month from Missy Meyer Fonts:

Stay tuned for our next Club Chaos featured guest designer!