Oliver

What was Type Jam?

Tradecraft hosted a Type Jam! An event dedicated to bringing people together to learn from experts and create some cool fonts. Here is a cool blog post that pretty much sums it up: TL;DR.

This was my first time even thinking about developing a typeface. After downloading Glyphs and getting some instruction from some very talented type designers, I set to work.

Control Letters

Interestingly, there are a number of phrases designers use that contain 'control' letters. These letters have many of the shapes needed to build out the rest of the alphabet.

The phrase that I worked with was:

OHRecognisably

If you look closely at the forms of these letters, you will see that elements of certain letters can be reused to create additional letters. The 'R' for example contains the 'P'. 'n' helps inform the 'm' and 'b' helps create the 'd'. 

Design and development

After dozens of sketches and conversations with other Type Jammers, I had an 'R' that I was pleased with.

The Oliver typeface isn't a fully fleshed out typeface but I hope to round it out in the coming months. The type jam was a fantastic learning opportunity and gave me an appreciation for type designers and a much stronger understanding of typography and font selection.

The cherry on top? My type was awarded third place by a panel of type designers which is pretty cool for a total novice type designer like me!

Oliver is a work in progress. I plan to revisit a number of the character shapes and then interpolate a a bold and a light font weight, as well as build out the common type set with numbers, punctuation, and special characters.