I learned to read and write when I was pretty young, and if you look through any book from my childhood, you'll find it absolutely filled with writing practice. Words and letters fill the endpapers and the margins.

In school, friends called me Julie Twelve — a nod to Times 12, the font we always had to use to type our term papers and assignments — because they said my handwriting looked like a font in Microsoft Word.

My academic years were both training for and an atypical path to my type design career. I studied visual communication, worked in IT writing Java and C++, then landed in grad school for English working toward my Ph.D.

Pursuing that degree was fun — but not what I wanted long-term. So I quit. Realizing I needed a career with more personal and creative freedom, I launched Up Up Creative as a graphic design business and never looked back.

Over the next several years, I built Up Up Creative into a pretty successful graphic design business, seeing my work featured in magazines like Martha Stewart Living and BRIDES. I also started to rely pretty heavily on my own handlettering in my design work.

After meeting a professional type designer (wait, that's a thing?!), I was obsessed. I launched my first typeface, Bundt Cake, and was hooked. It didn’t make a ton of money, but it did well enough that I knew I could eventually build a career in type design.

Over the next decade, I phased out client work to focus entirely on letters — studying type, drawing characters, honing my craft, and building fonts. In ten years, I published 31 typefaces, ranging from playful scripts to refined serifs to modern sans serifs.

These days, I design fonts that are expressive yet functional — that support your work, not distract from it. Whether you’re working on brands, books, or big ideas, I create type that helps your message come through clearly, beautifully, and with a little edge.