We’re big fans of Tré Seals at PRINT. In addition to his type design through Vocal Type, a studio he founded, his influence and design leadership continue to elevate the conversation around diversity in design. Seals was recently honored with the Citizen Design Award as part of the 2025 PRINT Awards for his work on CHARACTERS: Type in Action at MODA, an exhibition that explores how typography shapes both oppression and liberation (Type Tuesday coverage of the exhibition). The award-winning designer also rightly appears on Creative Boom’s list of the 20 most inspiring designers in 2025 and the Eames Institute’s Curious 100.
VTC Martin is Seals’ most recent release (poetically, on Juneteenth), but it’s a product of nine years of refinement—seeded in 2016 as his first typeface, and growing into the complete VTC Martin font family.
In a D&AD Dinner With interview, Seals spoke about his purpose-driven work and his process, which typically starts with curiosity about a particular movement and all the ephemera that comes with it. Seals is intentional about the specific source of inspiration: it must be something used by the collective, such as a banner or protest poster. “That’s one thing you might notice with my work,” he says, “because it reinforces this idea of unity.”
For VTC Martin, the spark was lit by the “I AM A MAN” signs from the Memphis sanitation strike (February to April, 1968). It was to be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s final campaign; he was assassinated in Memphis on April 4.
VTC Martin is a non-violent font family that continues to call for dignity and justice.
Tré Seals
A particular conundrum when dealing with protest signs as a starting point is how to fill in the missing characters, numbers, lowercase letterforms, and lighter weights. For this, Seals had a lucky discovery on eBay: a 1970 Hamilton Wood Type catalog, which revealed that the signs used Plain Gothic No. 6243 (from 1906). Historian David Shields, a wood type expert, helped fill in some of the context.
Read the fascinating history of the Memphis sanitation strike and more about Seal’s process bringing VTC Martin to life on VocalType.co.
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