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

Most people have seen Chris Costello's work without ever learning his name. If you watched Avatar, you read its subtitles in a font he drew. If you have ever scrolled a typeface menu and passed 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 snagged 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 — about $2,500 in today's money — and, by his own account, has seen only "very low" royalties since. The font went on to ship on 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 unraveling at the fact that Avatar's logo was just "regular Papyrus."

That is act one. Act two is the one collectors know. Costello had collected coins since childhood and dreamed, for years, of designing one. The dream came slowly. He applied to the U.S. Mint in 2004 and was turned down. Instead of quitting, he spent the next six years sharpening a second craft — calligraphy, engraving, 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 America's coins and medals. More than two decades after he first won a coin-design contest, he was finally inside.

Costello's style is old-fashioned in the best sense. He says he gravitates to "the pen, pencil, and watercolor styles of the 19th and early 20th centuries," and his heroes read like a roll call of illustration and sculpture: William Morris, Aubrey Beardsley, and Franklin Booth on the page; Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Adolph Weinman — the sculptors behind America's most beautiful coins — in the metal. His stated aim is to "merge traditional drawing and contemporary design" as far as the two will go.

Drawing a coin is harder than it sounds, because a coin is not a drawing. A designer hands artwork to a Mint sculptor-engraver — the staff artist who turns a flat image into the three-dimensional model the dies are cut from. (The die is the hardened steel stamp that strikes the design into the blank. Relief is how high the raised parts stand; it decides how the finished coin catches light.) The better a designer understands relief, the better the coin. So Costello went and learned the other half of the job. He won a scholarship to the American Numismatic Association's engraving seminar, studied under a Bureau of Engraving and Printing engraver, took a sculpture workshop at Brookgreen Gardens, and taught himself digital sculpting. He draws first in pencil, then finishes in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop — a bridge from the hand to the machine.

His instinct on a coin is for motion. His most celebrated design is an eagle that neither perches nor poses — it dives, wings swept, "eyes toward opportunity." That is the choice of an illustrator who spent a career making a still page feel alive.

The headline piece is the reverse — the tails side — of the 2017 American Liberty 225th Anniversary $100 gold coin: a bald eagle in flight, sculpted by Mint engraver Michael Gaudioso. It mattered for the metal as much as the art. It was the first high-relief coin with a proof finish the United States Mint ever struck — a "proof" being a specially polished, mirror-field collector strike. In 2019 that coin won Best Gold Coin at the Coin of the Year (COTY) awards in Berlin, the closest thing the field has to an Oscar. (COTY judges coins from two years earlier, which is why a 2017 coin won in 2019.)

But pinning Costello to one coin undersells him. Since 2010 the Mint has turned more than two dozen of his designs into coins and medals. He designed both the obverse and reverse of the 2014 Eleanor Roosevelt First Spouse $10 gold coin — the reverse shows her hand lighting a candle above a curved Earth — which was itself a Coin of the Year nominee. He designed the 2015 Lady Bird Johnson First Spouse reverse, the 2017 Boys Town Centennial half dollar (both sides), the obverse of the 2019 American Legion 100th Anniversary $5 gold coin, the Mark Twain commemorative, and the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Congressional Gold Medal. The son of a Korean War B-29 tail gunner, he has gravitated to coins that carry American history — and his initials, CTC, sit quietly in many of them.

Then came the piece that broke the mold. For the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage in 2020, Costello won a competition to design the coins and medals — and the result became the first coin the Royal Mint had ever issued from a U.S. Mint designer, struck on both sides of the Atlantic at once. For collectors, there is one more wrinkle worth knowing: Costello hand-signs certification labels exclusively for NGC, one of the two major U.S. grading companies. A slabbed coin he designed can also carry his signature on the holder — designer and autograph in the same sealed case.