Inaugural Issue of PT Zine produced in collaboration with Christian Solorzano and Sean Fermoyle of the Chicago Graphic Design club and PT Type Foundry
PT Zine
I designed the typeface Sufamelico last summer and named it after a Spanish-language cipher I used as a kid to encode messages.
SUFAMELICO- you can create coded messages by swaping letters,
S = U
F = A
M = E
L = I
C = O
A word like “HELLO” becomes coded as “HMIIC”.
Here’s some other examples to help paint the picture:
USE = SUM
THIS = THLU
CODE = OCDM
TO = TC
HIDE = HLDM
INFORMATION = LNACREFTLCN
At the time of making this typeface (April 2025) I was working on a project with a University of Chicago astronomer visualising what life forms could look like on far away exo planets. My mind was thinking about coded languages and alien plants. I was imagining planets where the plants communicate through waves of color and shape, and I was dreaming of rooms where floating symbols hid coded messages.
At the same time, ICE was active in Chicago. As concerns about surveillance grew, more people turned to encrypted messaging apps like Signal to keep their communications private.
One day I sat down and drew out letters as an exercise and that’s how the typeface came to be, it was all very quick.
I shared some of this work with Christian, founder of Chicago Graphic Design Club, and he reached out with a new project he was starting, PT Zine (pronounced “Point”). He said he wanted the zine to be a series of expressive, experimental type case studies and asked if I’d like to design the inaugural issue. I said yes.
I took the opportunity to treat this zine as a huge puzzle and filled it with coded messages and images that I created exclusively for this project.
If you purchased this zine, the key to the puzzles is provided below.
If you don’t have you’re copy yet you can purchase through the Chicago Graphic Design club, all proceeds go to support the club.
Sketches and Inspo
The characters for this typeface were inspired by math forms. In fact, some of the letters like X, A and S, were made by tracing shapes directly from the Jinsihou templates that I’ve collected and used in my work the past few years.
Puzzle Key for PT Zine
Puzzle 1
Deciphering the story
!!!
Add up the first letter of every grouping to form a new sentence.
Puzzle 2
Spot all 37 “eye”s hidden in the zine
Puzzle 3
Deciphering the quote in the middle of the interview, this one I can’t give away since it comes with a special gift for those who solve it.
The flower image on the opposite page also spells the word “GARDEN”
Other hidden messages
If you take the first letter of each answer in the interview and put it into a sentence, you’ll find a hidden message.
On the cover image, I hid the word “ONE”, an homage to this being the inaugural issue of PT zine.
(“UFO” grouping also shows up a few times there but I’m calling that a happy accident)