Tucson residents are helping write the city’s story – in finger paint.
The city is developing its first official typeface using lines and curves painted by residents at Tucson Meet Yourself on Oct. 17. The project invited Tucsonans to leave their mark on a font that will eventually appear in the city’s tourism marketing.
The project took months of planning. It’s part of Nuestra Cultura Goes Wild, a program focused on celebrating Tucson’s cultural identity. The premise is to accentuate that the city’s defining feature isn’t just its landscape or landmarks, but its people.
A community leaves its mark
On Oct. 17, during the annual Tucson Meet Yourself festival, three large canvases stood in the plaza of the Historic Pima County Courthouse. From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., hundreds of people stopped by to dip a finger in paint and draw a line or curve. Tucson Mayor Regina Romero joined in, too.
“People just loved the idea of leaving their mark and making Tucson history,” said Czarina Nafarrate, multicultural marketing manager for Visit Tucson.
Participants weren’t asked to paint elaborate pictures or write their names. They only needed to make a simple mark — a building block for a much larger design.
“We just want lines and curves,” Nafarrate said. “But then we can put it together into a typeface that will then carry Tucson’s fingerprints with it in any messaging we do.”
Turning paint into a typeface
Bringing those marks together is the job of Tommy Gomez, executive director of the Los Angeles-based marketing company The Culturist Group, which Visit Tucson hired to digitize the artwork.
Gomez had never visited Tucson before taking on the project. To understand the city, he researched its history and interviewed local residents, business owners and artists.
“It was this idea that there's an unspoken Tucson magic,” he said.
Still, the concept came with a question: Would enough people participate to make a working font possible?
Gomez tested early versions of the design in his backyard before seeing the project take shape in person at Tucson Meet Yourself. Watching residents approach the canvases, he said, gave him a glimpse of the camaraderie and community he had been researching.
“I can't begin to tell you how somehow Tucson keeps showing up in ways that like no other city ever has before,” Gomez said. “Everybody was so curious, enthusiastic or just delighted by the whole thing.”
By the end of the day, residents had supplied the raw material for the project to move forward.
Gomez’s team will photograph and scan the painted marks, then combine individual lines and arcs to create the letters of an uppercase alphabet.
“So we take pictures of that, digitize that and then we kind of stitch together essentially the segments of people's lines and arcs that are dependent on how much we need for each letter,” he said.
Using the design software Glyphs, Gomez expects to assemble the marks into a finished typeface in about two weeks.
A font made for Tucson
Once complete, the font will be used in Visit Tucson’s marketing materials, with a downloadable version planned for public use.
The project turns an everyday design element into a collective portrait of the city: a typeface shaped not by one designer’s hand, but by the marks of hundreds of Tucsonans.
The font’s name and final design are expected to be announced in November.
