Creepy Fingers

Brad Davis is the bass player of Californian stoner rock band Fu Manchu. He’s also the guy behind Creepy Fingers, a brand of fuzz pedals. After selling the first Sugarboosts to friends in 2007, he officially founded Creepy Fingers Effects in 2008. In a 2011 interview with FXDB, Davis says that his friend Emily Burton from Fireball Ministry suggested the name and also designed the logo.

If you told me that this is an obscure face from the days of photo-lettering or rub-down type, I would have fallen for it. In fact, this typeface isn’t from 1969. It was released in 1999, by House Industries, the masters of retro design. Cyberspace is part of the House 3009 font kit, an “intergalactic collection [that] originates from complex alien signals which have been decoded, phonologically transliterated and returned to earth as proprietary letter forms”. I haven’t seen Cyberspace in meaningful use before, and the psychedelic lowercase-only design is admittedly difficult to put to good to use. For Creepy Fingers, though, it fits like a glove. All that Burton had to adjust was adding a capital F for less ambiguity and raising the g for a more compact wordmark.

For fifteen years now, Davis has been using the font with admirable consistency. Cyberspace adorns virtually all of his pedals, not only in the logo, but also for the individual names and the labels. All pedals are built by Davis himself – handwired, with powdercoated and silkscreened enclosures: “I like the pedals to have a classic eye candy sort of look. Sometimes with a color theme that ties in with the name of the pedal.”