Catherine Leigh Schmidt is a designer who makes fonts, websites, & printed stuff. She got a BFA in Graphic Design from RISD in 2014.
Catherine Leigh Schmidt is a designer who makes fonts, websites, & printed stuff. She got a BFA in Graphic Design from RISD in 2014. She built this website with her bare hands.
Yatra is a Devanagari and Latin display font based on the hand-painted signage of the Mumbai Railways. It's available for free on Google Fonts. Yatra was the result of research from a Fulbright scholarship in India.
Yatra mimics the high-contrast, modulated, chunky style of Mumbai rail sign painting. Like the rail signs, Yatra includes basic Marathi support. Yatra aims to illustrate how typography for civic contexts, rather than aiming for simplicity and universality, can instead retain local and historic qualities.
Yatra has a pretty complete Devanagari glyphset and supports Adobe Latin 3 with a few fun extras. A few Marathi alternates are also included.
Bindery lets you keep your web & print content in one place. The template does the work of formatting your content for print.
We envision Bindery being used for show catalogs, blogs, and portfolios. It's currently being used to serve RISD GD's Design Studio curriculum online & in print.
I worked on Jekyll configuration and stylesheets for this project. I also designed the look & feel of the documentation site.
I made a web specimen to showcase my font, Yatra. I wanted to show Yatra at large sizes, as it was meant to be. Check out the specimen.
Yatra is a Devanagari and Latin display font based on the hand-painted signage of the Mumbai Railways. It's available for free on Google Fonts. Yatra was the result of research from a Fulbright scholarship in India.
While working for RISD in their Media Group I was asked to redesign the campus map for visiting prospective students. The map also serves as a take-away, with information about the school.
Art directed by Micah Barrett.
While working for RISD in their Media Group I was asked to redesign the sandwich board signs put around campus at several points in the school year. The original design was too playful to feel official. The redesign is easier to produce, more flexible, more sober, and follows RISD's new type standards.
I also designed a standards manual to accompany the system.
Art directed by Micah Barrett.
I did some contracting for Everlane. I made a press release, designed some emails, and did some typesetting.
Art Director: Alexandra Spunt, Creative Director: Lee Cerre. Art Direction by Quinn Cantwell. Photos shot by Fahim Kassam. Production by Cristina Viseu. Everything belongs to Everlane.
A little sketch for RISD's physical phonebook, made while I was working in their Media Group.
Art directed by Micah Barrett.
While working at the RISD Media Group, I designed materials for the RISD Maharam STEAM Fellowship 5 year celebration. This take-away gave guests info about the fellowship while highlighting past and present fellows.
Art directed by Micah Barrett.
While TA-ing for John Caserta's web workshops at RISD, I made some web sketches to show to students. In the course students were encouraged to use the browser as an expressive drawing tool.
I designed a poster for RISD's Academic Commons Program that could be left intact or divided into mail-box sized leaflets.
A web-to-print poster calling for fellows for the Design Office Fellowship. The website is the poster. The sun skews on scroll, so you can have infinite permutations of the same poster, depending on when you press ⌘P. A collaboration with John Caserta.
Before Soylent was branded by OKFocus, I made a tongue-in-cheek brand identity for a school project 😉
I proposed an identity that would be cheeky instead of clinical or futuristic. The identity appeals to a soylent drinker's sense of irony.
Also proposed was the tagline It's Perfect™
When I was a student I was the president of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Enginering, Art, and Math) student group because I liked to code. I designed an identity that was flexible, extensible, and recognizable when remade by someone without the same software as me. The identity was a part of a toolkit that could be shared with new STEAM student groups at other universities.
for / with / in, a project formally known as "html-output", is a website which prints to a book using the browser's print function. The site presents a series of graphic design and code experiments about using the browser as a tool for graphic design. I worked collaboratively with a group of students and John Caserta to assemble the projects into a website and a book which would print from the browser.
"Chini" means sugar in Hindi. Chini is a Devanagari and Latin display typeface (in progress) that I made as a part of my degree project at RISD. Chini was my first attempt at a Devanagari typeface.
Chini was inspired round-brush painted signs common in parts of north India. It's meant to be used in display sizes, ideally for the web. Now that I know more about designing type for Devanagari, I look forward to adjusting this font.
This project was featured in Filipino Folk Foundry by Hardworking Goodlooking, available through Draw Down books.
This process book documents projects completed for my Color class at RISD. Because color is relative, I explored the interaction of color by eschewing a neutral ground for the work. I added a textured background to add interest to many spreads of solid color.
My face is on the book to identify it as my work. The book was printed with an inkjet printer and hand-bound.
