When most people picture California, they imagine coastal breezes, morning fog, and maybe even a hoodie in July. But Bakersfield tells a different story. Tucked into the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, it regularly pushes past 100 degrees while the rest of the state clings to its beach-town mythos. Returning home from the Central Coast meant bracing for the kind of heat that turned sidewalks into stovetops and car interiors into saunas.

Fortunately, my in-laws’ garage held a modest oasis: an old Coldspot refrigerator. Chrome-handled and humming, it quietly stood guard over leftovers and Rolling Rocks, encased in glowing green glass allowing plenty of light to settle in for a biting, skunky finish. But beyond the chilled air and the nostalgia, something else stood out: the fridge’s internal lettering. Debossed into drawers and shelves was a typeface with narrow proportions, subtle Art Deco roots, and a distinctly industrial feel—clean, functional, and oddly elegant.

That lettering became the seed for Appliance, a typeface two decades in the making. Based on the partial alphabet found in the Coldspot’s interior, the font bridges early 1950s industrial design with contemporary typographic structure. Every glyph was redrawn by hand, with missing characters reconstructed and lowercase forms extrapolated from the uppercase geometry. The softened curves reflect the casting techniques of the era, while crisp baselines give it contemporary clarity.

Coldspot was one of Sears’ flagship appliance brands, introduced in 1928 and later absorbed into Kenmore. In 1934, Sears hired Raymond Loewy to redesign the line. His streamlined Coldspot helped reshape American consumer expectations—proving that aesthetics and function could sell side by side. While there’s no direct evidence that Loewy created the original Coldspot typography, his influence on the visual language of the time is unmistakable, and traces of that legacy live on in Appliance.

The completed typeface includes nearly 1,100 glyphs with Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin Small Caps support, covering 304 languages and over 3 billion speakers. Four stylistic sets provide alternate letterforms, small caps, and superscripted percent features. Whether digital or physical, Appliance is built for titling, signage, and applications where space is tight but character still matters.

Appliance is a typographic tribute to an era when even utility was designed with care—and a reminder that inspiration sometimes lives in the quiet, frosted corners of a garage fridge.