Stuart Sandler could very well be Eau Claire’s most successful and least known commercial artist – all at the same time. If you ask him what he does, he’ll probably tell you that he “makes computer software,” because he thinks his real title is too hard to explain, but we’ll just assume most Volume One readers will know exactly what Stuart does: he’s a font designer. He creates fonts and sells them over the internet. To a lot of people. He actually runs five different font foundries (biggest: Font Diner) and a few other smaller companies, all based around typefaces and graphic design.

His small company with a huge portfolio was pretty successful before he moved to town almost five years ago, and it’s yet to slow down. His fonts have been used for some pretty high profile companies and products, from Super 8 motels to ZhuZhu Pets to Whatchamacallit candy bars to Coco Puffs cereal to Curves. And countless other places like Aunt Jemima buckwheat pancake mix boxes and the cover of Mo Willems kids’ books. They are absolutely everywhere. If you see a typeface that has a retro-americana vibe to it, it was probably designed by Stuart – he’s obsessed with the signage of that era.

The big news now is that Stuart was featured in MyFonts.com’s September newsletter, which doesn’t sound like a big deal unless you know that it’s distributed to roughly one million subscribers (give or take a few ten thousand). MyFonts is just huge, and to a font designer, this is like getting featured on Pitchfork (but considerably geekier). The feature is a huge Q&A with Stuart, and if you like fonts or American signage from the 1920s-60s you should check it out. (The main photo was taken by a local photographer, BTW.)