Jack Curtis

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Leth was an experiment. It was created during the five weeks of TypeParis 2018 and is available in 5 weights…sort of. The brief abandoned a typical application for the typeface and instead became an exploration of differing letterform.

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My sources came from two grave stone carvings from NY, USA as well as a statue of King George III in Weymouth, England. My goal was to create two drastically different typefaces, interpolate the two, and see what the outcomes were. The results are a family with two drastically different extremes. On one end there is a condensed, thin weight and on the other a larger, extended weight. The middle weights however, begin to calm down from their extreme counterparts.

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The process for developing the family was to draw both typefaces simultaneously. I didn’t want to complete one face and move onto the other fearing that one would dictate the other. The drawing process became quite manic as I switched back and forth between the two.

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Ultimately my typeface was developed somewhat blindly. I was far into the process before I even saw my roman weight, something that most attendees started with. In the end however, this allowed for great experimentation in the two extremes and the roman ended up being a typeface that I did not directly design myself.

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The name Leth is of Anglo Saxon origin and translates to “an evil person or thing”. With one of my original sources being directly related to the English monarch, and because monarchs are inherently evil, I chose to use the british hierarchal system for the different weights. This abandoned a traditional regular, medium, bold application because each interpolation had become their own shapes and letter forms.

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