The Briggs & Neeter sign is part of a column of hand-painted advertisements left exposed on what is now a modern glass tower at the edge of the CBD. The block once sat in what locals called Little Lon: a few short laneways off Lonsdale and Leichhardt Streets, home to a working-class community of Irish, Chinese, Italian, Syrian and Jewish residents from the 1840s through the mid-twentieth century. It was the most ethnically diverse part of nineteenth-century Melbourne.

The signs catalogue what was there before the towers: Robert Martin's furniture workshop, the Neeter & Briggs furrier upstairs at 22 Little Leichhardt Street, a photo engraver. Their lettering was painted by hand with a flat brush. You can see it in the slight outward flare at the head and foot of each downstroke.

I started with the letter R, taking the proportions, weight and brush-flare from the painted original. From there the alphabet built itself out, each letter shaped by the same flat-brush logic.

Lonsdale was released as a single bold weight in 2019. Soon after, Giuseppe Santamaria picked it up as a headline face for the Australia and New Zealand edition of The Robb Report.