The the who fell in love with the full stop is a short story written in collaboration by Ste Sawyer and designed by Matt McMillan & Joe Mason of Yes/No Studio.

Flashback a few years and we find Ste and Joe – a classic copywriter/art director team – working late into the night at the same Ad agency. Amongst the layout pads, sharpies, screwed up ramblings and leftover takeaway pizzas, Ste shared his idea for a children’s story that would playfully explore the world of letters and words. If only there were some images to go with it…
With the help of Yes/No Studio’s print expert, Matt, in 2020 we produced another small run of test digital print versions to share with friends and family. Their feedback and enthusiasm for the new format was so positive that Joe was inspired to further refine the visuals and produce something really special that people would be proud to own or give as a gift.

Early visuals used regular fonts to create the characters. This helped to explore the initial ideas and scenes to support the story, but we felt it was still lacking something. More development was done around hand-shaped letters with a freer, ‘less perfect’ and more organic style, giving the characters their much-needed personality.

Finally, Joe arrived at a process and style of characters that felt unique and memorable enough to match the beautiful words written by Ste. This hand-crafted approach has allowed Joe to further develop his style in producing quirky letterforms and art prints. More of which you can see here @joemason.

The end result of all this internal questioning and hard labour is a beautiful book, a classic love story, brought to life through the world of distinctive typographic characters.