Chris Costello: the man who drew Papyrus, then drew an eagle in gold

Most people have seen Chris Costello's work without ever knowing his name. If you watched Avatar, you read the alien language in a font he drew. If you have ever picked a typeface from a menu and scrolled past one with rough, ancient-looking edges, you have met Papyrus — and Costello is the man who made it.

He drew it in 1982, at 23, just out of college. He had been reading the Bible and got caught on a simple question: what would English have looked like written 2,000 years ago, on papyrus, in the Middle East? He spent six months answering it with a calligraphy pen and textured paper, one letter at a time. Letraset released the result in 1983. Costello sold the rights for $750. The font went on to ship inside Mac and Windows systems for decades and become so over-used that, in 2017, Saturday Night Live built an entire Ryan Gosling sketch around a man driven mad by the fact that Avatar's logo was just "regular Papyrus." Costello has said plainly it was never meant for that: "it's way overused."

That is act one. Act two is the one numismatists know. Costello had collected coins since childhood and dreamed, for years, of designing one. The dream did not come easy. He applied to the U.S. Mint in 2004 and was turned down. Instead of quitting, he spent six years sharpening his craft — calligraphy, engraving workshops, sculpture — and reapplied. In 2010 the Mint accepted him into its Artistic Infusion Program (AIP), the pool of outside artists the Mint commissions to design coins and medals. The veteran chief engraver John Mercanti, by Costello's account, warned him that working for the Mint would be the hardest chapter of his artistic life. Costello took the warning as a calling.

Costello's style is deliberately old-fashioned in the best sense. "My illustration style is clearly traditional," he has said — he gravitates to "the pen, pencil, and watercolor styles of the 19th and early 20th centuries." His heroes are the illustrators William Morris, Aubrey Beardsley, and Franklin Booth, and, on the coin side, the great American sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Adolph Weinman. His stated aim is to "merge traditional drawing and contemporary design styles as much as possible."

The difference between a flat drawing and a struck coin is the hard part, and Costello chased it. A coin designer hands a drawing to a Mint sculptor-engraver, the staff artist who turns a two-dimensional design into the three-dimensional model the dies are cut from. The better a designer understands relief — how high and low surfaces catch light on metal — the better the finished coin. So Costello went and learned the other craft: he won a scholarship to the American Numismatic Association's engraving workshop, took a sculpture workshop at Brookgreen Gardens, and taught himself digital sculpting. He draws first in pencil on paper, then finishes in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop — a bridge between the hand and the machine.

His instinct on a coin is for motion. The work he is best known for is an eagle that does not perch or pose — it dives. That is the choice of an illustrator who spent a career making a still page feel alive.