About Us

Spell with shapes that look like letters. Alphabet Shapes is the first custom T-shirt website offering a full color, letter by letter name creator. Using our online tool, visitors can order ANY name (person, business, place, thing) on a shirt, choosing the style of each letter from our library of full-color, hand illustrated characters. Moving beyond the single colors and plain fonts of other personalization sites, Alphabet Shapes allows you to create a name that truly reflects the subject. 

My name is Jeff Yas and I began officially drawing Alphabet Shapes in 2004 while creating letters for my first Brooklyn t-shirt design. Forever lured into Brooklyn's web of landmarks, graffiti, storefronts, signs and shadows, I began seeing many shapes that look like letters. This interest grew further as a new parent teaching ABC's upon the discovery of books like ABC NYC, by Joanne Dugan and Anno's Alphabet by Mitsumasa Anno.

Balancing a sketchbook on the stroller, my young children and I began spelling the letters of Brooklyn with the things around us: ice cream cones at Coney Island, baseball players in Prospect Park, Hebrew letters on Ocean Parkway, The B from the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper at the library, a pizza from Smiling Pizza on 9th street, a basketball from the courts in Fort Greene, the N from the arch at Grand Army Plaza, musicians at Celebrate Brooklyn, and so on. We still spend early mornings at the kitchen table, strewn with tracing paper, sketchbooks and pencils, imagining new letters for Alphabet Shapes. Their ideas are usually the best. Their unique perspective, along with their honest reactions and rejections, have proven critical to the growth of Alphabet Shapes, and I thank them here.

From an early age, most of us somehow love type. For me, it started with penmanship and early stenciling, hanging letters at the Hardware store, competitive doodling, technical drawing in high school. Studying new languages like Hebrew and Arabic, while sketching ceramics and drafting maps as a field archaeologist. Travel opened my eyes wider:  the pyramids at Giza and the Yucatan, mystical writing from Jewish Zfat, the Book of Kells in Dublin, and the Mosques of Istanbul were all typographic revelations, illustrating the eternal dance between letters and shapes, the act of writing-as-art.

The Brooklyn shirts became popular at street fairs, though many customers wanted to personalize them. Looking more broadly, our culture today expects choice, flexibility and personalized content. In this context, there was only so far I could go with pre-printed, single color Brooklyn shirts. I imagined a custom t-shirt business which allowed people to pick each letter themselves, in full color and have it printed on the shirt of their choice.

The New York City shirt was my first experiment with full color letters, printing them on totes and t-shirts. Now I had a growing list of extra letters, with which I began spelling new names. Then came the sketches for new places, like Boston, Cape Cod and California. Trying to get closer to my dream of full customization, I began a search for a creative web developer who could help get this process online.

Sarah Chamberlin of Abacus Design developed Alphabet Shape's unique online tool which allows visitors to type in any name, play with each letter, selecting the style of their choice from a growing pool of characters. I still love playing with the little engine she created. Thanks to Abacus, I can focus on the detailed letter making process, updating the site with a solid backend. You should hire her.

Every day I try to bring a new letter to life: sketching, tracing, scanning, retouching, vectorizing, colorizing, outputting and uploading. Now that the site is up and running, I have begun revising old letters, filling in the gaps, listening to my visitor's feedback, trying to create a new letter every day (more girly styles on the horizon). In the future, I imagine Alphabet Shapes inviting guest artists, as well as my customers themselves, to share their alphabets on the site. The future is bright! Now go make a name for yourself.

Alphabet Shapes can also serve as an effective learning tool for young children, turning letter making into a form of imagination, sparking curiosity and developing familiarity with the variety of letterforms. Adults and will also enjoy this typographic playground, discovering the endless possible ways to render any given word.