Leslie Cabarga has been a working illustrator and designer since 1970. He has authored over two dozen books on design including
A Treasury of German Trademarks,
Dynamic Black and White Illustration,
The Fleischer Story and
The Designer’s Guide to Global Color Combinations. As an illustrator he’s drawn magazine covers for Time, Newsweek, Fortune and National Lampoon. He has also worked as a designer in the art departments of Rolling Stone and San Francisco’s City Magazine.
At the age of twelve, an interest in lettering surfaced and he spent months copying logos and lettering out of magazines. At 17, he pieced together negatives of an alphabet he’d drawn to create a font for a photo lettering Typositer. By 1975 Cabarga was offering hand lettering and logo design services under the nom de plume Handy Lettering Company. And by 1993 he’d created the first of many successful computer fonts such as
Magneto Bold,
Streamline,
Kobalt Bold, and the psychedelic 60s font families,
Love and Peace.
His recent book,
Logo, Font & Lettering Bible, a complete guide to drawing and understanding letterforms, has been exceptionally well-received and his latest,
Learn FontLab Fast, the long-awaited, simplified manual for the FontLab program was released in July of 2004.
Leslie’s studio is on the web as
FlashFonts.