Source: A 19th century Irish fellow suffering from brain freeze
Typefaces: hand-drawn lettering
Last week I finished reading my daughters Ivan Day’s new book about the history of ice cream in Britain. For a couple hundred years ice cream and flavored ices were enjoyed only by the wealthy. Street vendors first started selling ices in London sometime in the 1850s. An English journalist interviewed one of these vendors who described his working class customers’ first reaction to the cold treats. He spoke of an “Irish fellow,” who chugged the glass of water ice all at once and was surprised to receive what we would today recognize as “brain freeze.”
Growing up near Philadelphia, flavored Italian ices were always called “water ice.” I didn’t realize this was a regional thing. One time I went to a Rita’s in Maryland and asked for “cherry water ice.” The puzzled girl at the window told me “We have plain water and we have cherry ice, but we don’t have any cherry water.”
My hand lettering for this design was inspired by the type sketches of Matt Braun and daily drawings of Chris Piascik. The words were drawn in pen, scanned in, saved as bitmap files, and colored in InDesign. The ice texture background is actually a scan of a film negative which I picked from the free high res texture gallery on LostAndTaken.com.
