Mawst’s work from Fromagination.
There’s a Mexican place called Taqueria 3 Amigos that used to be on Henry Street. Last spring, there was a rather shabby-looking street sign out front, just a dry erase board with some menu items and a drawn-on smiley face. It caught the attention of Ray Mawst, a lettering artist based in Sun Prairie.
“I saw their board, and saw it was terrible,” he recalls. “I walked in and introduced myself as a designer and told the owner I could make him a sign. At that point, I didn’t want to take a paid job, so we agreed to trade for a bunch of tacos.” The new sign is displayed on the sidewalk outside the restaurant’s new location on Williamson Street, featuring characters reminiscent of the anthropomorphic produce from the animated children’s TV show, VeggieTales, except it’s three jalapeno peppers wearing mustaches and sombreros. It’s goofy, it’s fun — and it looks pro.
Some of Mawst’s work from Schroeder Knifeworks, and 3 Amigos (before and after).
Mawst has moved on to design lettering for a host of shop windows, posters and T-shirts around the Madison area. As the quintessential creative professional trying to make it in the so-called gig economy, he describes the ups and downs of his quest to perfect his craft and sketch out a workable career.
He enjoyed art class as a child and stuck with it through high school, though he didn’t consider himself particularly gifted and never suspected he’d become a professional. In fact, he had no knowledge of graphic design as a creative discipline until a few of his friends chose it as their college major.
Intrigued by the prospect of working in an artistic field, he enrolled in the graphic design program at the UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts and worked on the side as the in-house designer at a music store. He graduated in 2013 and took a job at a packaging design and branding company in New York City. It paid the bills, but it wasn’t his dream job.
He did pick up some tricks of the trade, however, and became more efficient with his time. And he started gravitating toward more specific interests, taking weekend workshops on lettering and calligraphy.
“Learning that little bit got the ball rolling in terms of my interest in custom lettering and the craftsmanship of it,” he says. “I decided that if I really wanted to do it, I needed to get better. I needed to devote time to perfecting the skills, so I quit my job.” That involved leaving New York and moving back into his parents’ house in Sun Prairie. He set up a studio space in the basement, where he still works today.
Given the advent of digital everything, Mawst admits that hand-lettering is a somewhat antiquated discipline, but there’s been strong interest from clients who value authenticity over convenience. “Digitally printing a vinyl sticker is super fast and cheap, but it comes down to quality and how long the art work will last,” he says. “Stickers dry up in the sun and end up looking all flaky. When a handmade sign gets old, it weathers and just ages better.”
Transitioning from a salaried position to a full-time contract worker has been a challenge. “I didn’t test the waters,” he says. “I just kind of needed to prove to myself that I could do what I wanted to do. I’m still trying to work on making it financially sustainable.”
Mawst found success by posting his work on Instagram, which has led to a hodgepodge of freelance assignments, including the window design on Fromagination’s storefront on South Carroll Street, T-shirt logos for Lake Effect Surf Shop and several book covers for California author Lissa Coffey. He also maintains an instructional blog on such techniques as reverse glass gilding, bracketing and condensed lettering, and occasionally offers instructional courses on calligraphy. And he’s teaching himself as he goes along.
“There’s so much to be learned from traditional tools, and how letters have been drawn for hundreds, if not thousands of years,” he says. “You can take that knowledge and use it in the digital space.”
To order lettering for signs, packaging, logos, and more, or to learn more about the craft, go to raymawst.com.
