BIOG:

Keith Bates was born in Liverpool, England in 1951 and currently works as an Art & Design teacher at a Salford High School. He is well-known for his Mail Art activities since 1983, his postal art projects include The Abstract Realist Show (2002), The English Suppressionists (1993), and the recent Mailart Typeface (2004). His Ersatz Ephemera pieces turn humble tickets into mailartworks and can be seen at www.keithbates.co.uk together with three downloadable mailart inspired songs, the documentation for recent projects, and some of his fonts.

Keith fell in love with Fontographer in 2001. The K-Type foundry was established in 2003, and fonts available from the website at www.k-type.com include English (2003-04), initially an attempt to combine the power of Helvetica with the home-grown elegance of Gill Sans, Context (2002), an exercise in omission, and the freebie Lexia Readable (2004), based on Comic Sans for legibility, but casting off the American comic book styling.

Having created Gill New Antique in 2003, an imaginary, undiscovered second sans of Eric Gill, Keith continued to study Gill's work and made the first digital version of Solus, originally cut in 1929, the following year (available as Non Solus for copyright reasons).
The Mailart Typeface is an experiment in eclecticism, created in 2004 from 150 contributions from mailartists worldwide. Mail Art continues to feed his type design - Mailart Rubberstamp (2004) is based on the rubberstamped envelopes sent by several mailartists, and Susanna (2004) was drawn as a typo-diary in response to Susanna Lakner's mail art project, 22 Days. Susanna and another recent work, Plasterboard, are currently under consideration by the FontFont Typeboard.

Some recent Keith Bates free fonts are available from www.1001fonts.com