Typography & type design
A typeface commissioned for the exhibition “Andrea Mantegna, Pittore Mantovano”: serif capitals with a sans lowercase, in six weights.
The problem
A typeface for an exhibition about a fifteenth-century painter, commissioned by a polytechnic’s architecture programme, has to be in two places at once. Look only to the Renaissance and it becomes historical pastiche that no longer belongs to the institution showing it; look only to the present and the painter’s name on the cover carries no authority. And it has to hold both the title on the wall and the caption in the catalogue.
What I designed
- Two systems in one alphabet: serif capitals, sans lowercase. Not two cuts to alternate — the jump happens inside the word, the only place where the two periods actually touch.
- Wedge serifs, cut on the diagonal rather than bracketed: they read as carved, not written. That is where the architectural half of the reference comes from.
- A lowercase built on circles and straight stems, close to monoline. Its job is to stop the two systems competing: the capitals carry the historical register, the lowercase keeps the text in the present.
- Six weights, with serifs that don’t thin in proportion to the stem: at the light weights they would vanish, and the reference with them.
- An extended Latin set drawn rather than inherited — Æ, ß, Ð — because a public exhibition prints names and loans from other languages.
- Punctuation and symbols assigned to the right system: dots and braces follow the geometry of the lowercase, currencies carry the serifs of the capitals.
A sans display face drawn as a variable font: one weight axis running from hairline to black, at low contrast. For headlines, brands and mastheads.
The problem
A variable display face has to hold two extremes that are usually drawn as separate typefaces. At minimum weight the stems go to hairlines and the curves tend to disappear before the verticals do; at maximum weight the counters close and the letters collapse into blots. Between them sits an infinite number of weights nobody draws by hand: they have to come out of the interpolation already correct.
What I designed
- Contrast kept low and constant along the whole axis: curves and stems are near enough the same thickness at every weight. That is the condition for the hairline to stay a continuous line instead of breaking where the curve thins out.
- One skeleton for the whole family. The double-storey g shows it plainly: a circle, a rounded loop and a connecting stroke, the same at every weight — only how much they thicken changes.
- Counters reduced to simple geometric shapes so they stay open at black: in A and 4 the void is a minimal triangle, enough to tell the letter apart once everything else has closed.
- The extended set carried across the whole axis, not just the middle weights: accents, currencies, mathematical signs and braces all reach black. A headline containing a price or a formula shouldn’t have to change typeface halfway.
- At the extremes the non-alphabetic signs take on shapes of their own: at black the brace becomes a solid S cut flat at both ends, the tilde on Ñ flattens into a compact stroke to stay under the line height.
- Built as a variable font rather than a series of static weights: the user picks the exact point on the axis, and the named weights are instances of it, not separate files.
A geometric sans built from circles and straight stems, with a single-storey a and g — the shapes children are taught to write. Drawn to hold long text without losing that quality.
The problem
A sans built on the circle is normally a display face. In long text the circle is a liability: round letters take more room than straight ones, the rhythm loosens, and a single-storey a strips the word of one of its strongest recognition cues. The same shapes that make a typeface likeable at 60pt make it tiring at 10. Oxilia had to do both: stay readable across full pages and still work when it is large and the words are few.
What I designed
- The lowercase on one circle, repeated: o, b, d, p and q are the same shape rotated and mirrored. That is where the plain look comes from, and near-zero contrast keeps it plain as the text gets denser.
- Single-storey a and g: these are the shapes taught in handwriting, and they are the exact reason the face reads as ingenuous. A stated choice, not a leftover of the geometric construction.
- The capitals, by contrast, are not geometric: they keep classical widths — narrow B E F P R S, round C G O Q, wide M W. An alphabet of uniform-width capitals comes apart in a headline. The face changes system between the two cases, and that is what lets it hold two registers.
- Small breaks from the geometry where long text needs them: the t is cut on a slant at the top of its stem, the y descends on a straight diagonal rather than a tail. They are footholds — in a line of circles the eye needs something that is not a circle.
- Generous ascenders above the x-height: in a paragraph they keep one line clear of the next as much as the leading does.
- The extended Latin set drawn on the same skeleton: the tilde on Ñ is a full wave, and the bar of the Ø runs past the circle at both ends so it cannot be mistaken for an O at small sizes.
An alphabet drawn from one shape: the sine wave, the way sound is put on paper. The curve was cut and deformed until it became letters, and it doesn't stop where the letter does.
The problem
A sine wave can do almost nothing an alphabet needs. It has no thicks: it cannot give weight to a stem. It has no corners or terminals: it cannot close an A. It never breaks: it cannot make the dot on an i. And above all it encloses no space, while a, b, d, g, o, p and q live on closed bowls. The constraint was to keep the starting shape legible in every glyph, rather than using it as a pretext and then drawing normally the moment it became inconvenient.
What I designed
- One amplitude across the whole alphabet: the letters are different cuts of the same wave, not independent drawings. It is why a line of text reads as a single undulating line even when there are fifty letters in it.
- Constant weight, with no modulation at all. A sine wave has no thick and thin points, and the moment contrast is added the letter stops looking like a wave and starts looking like a script.
- Strokes do not stop at the letter's edge: they run past it and overlap the next one. The space between two letters is not a gap but the continuation of the curve, which turns spacing from a technical problem into part of the drawing.
- Bowls close by crossing, not by joining: the curve passes through itself. It is the only way to get an enclosed space out of a line that by nature never returns to where it started.
- Ascenders and descenders are crests and troughs of greater amplitude, not extended stems. The line therefore has an uneven high-and-low profile, which is exactly what a sound trace looks like.
- One element alone does not derive from the curve: the dot on i and j, a small diamond. A wave cannot produce a dot, and replacing it with a fragment of curve would have made it unreadable. It is the declared exception that makes the rule visible.
- Legibility deliberately held at the edge: some capitals are hard to recognise in isolation and only resolve inside a word. This is a face for headlines and marks, not for text — that is the choice.
A high-contrast display serif: solid stems and hairline joins, in a single weight. For headlines, marks and signage.
The problem
A single-weight typeface has no way out. There is no lighter cut to fall back on when it sits too heavy, and no darker one when more force is needed: whatever it does, it does in one version. High contrast makes the sum harder, because solid stems and hairline joins tighten the counters, and the same letter that is crisp on a sign closes up when it drops to a headline on paper. And there is a question of tone: a strongly contrasted serif looks immediately like nineteenth-century advertising, and then the face isn't contemporary, it is a quotation.
What I designed
- Contrast pushed hard, but with a stated minimum for the counters: in e, a and o the inner space is a narrow slit that never closes. That slit is the limit below which the letter would fill in at the smallest size the face is used.
- Thin, flat serifs, barely bracketed: they cut across the stem rather than growing out of it. It is the detail that keeps the face clear of nineteenth-century pastiche — the historical reference sits in the contrast, not in the joins.
- Teardrop terminals on a, c, f, r and y: the only rounded elements in an alphabet otherwise made of straight cuts. They are the elegant part, and they are few by design — one per letter, never two.
- One weight, not a family. The face is built for a range of sizes rather than a range of weights: everything a text face would solve by switching cut has to be solved inside a single drawing here.
- Figures, currencies and accented letters drawn with the same care as the letters, not bolted on at the end. A headline or a mark often carries a year, a name with an accent, a symbol: if those are weaker it shows at once, because they are as large as everything else.
- In the symbols the horizontal bars hold the hairline weight and the curves hold the stem weight. The sign then carries the same colour as the letters beside it, instead of becoming a lighter or darker patch in the line.
- Accents sit low and wide, close to the letter: at display sizes a thin, tall accent detaches from the body and reads as a smudge.
Visuals and lettering to promote the typefaces designed over the years, and for covers, posters and titles on commission.
The problem
A typeface is only visible when somebody uses it, and that opens two opposite problems. In promotion, nobody looks at a glyph chart, and the signs that would say the most — currencies, mathematical marks, brackets — are exactly the ones that never turn up in a specimen text. On commission the problem inverts: the letter has to carry content that isn’t its own — a title, a date, a cover — without turning into decoration.
What I designed
- One device in the promo posts, repeated: a circle over the glyph. Translucent, it blurs the stroke; solid, it covers it. Either way the shape has to be rebuilt in the head, and that is what holds the eye on a single letter instead of letting it skim a whole alphabet.
- As the subject of those posts, the part of the set usually left out: pound, yen, generic currency, times, division, braces. These are the glyphs that tell you whether a typeface is finished.
- In the commissioned work the letter is structure, not ornament. In the m the dog’s head grafts onto the last stem and the arches become its legs; in The OG the portrait’s neck runs down into the O.
- Where a system was needed rather than a single drawing, a modular alphabet built on a grid: Heavy Chest is one alphabet recomposed across poster, ticket and flyer in four colour pairings.
- Titles over images kept legible with an outline rather than a band behind them, so the photograph stays whole under the text.
- On records the typeface goes into the credits like every other trade: on the back of observer by |rg| the type design is credited next to the mastering.