Marina Sbrana

In my family nobody throws away books. I grew up surrounded by bookshelves full of notebooks with poetries handwritten by my great grandmother, my grandfather schoolbooks, old dictionaries, encyclopedias and many more. Between these there were also magazines full of fascinating old ads for different products and stories about travel.
When I started thinking about my project these images come immediately in mind, it looked an obvious choice, a comeback to the origins. The weird proportions of Italian Liberty typography always fascinated me even in times when I didn’t know anything about design and typography.

I wanted to see this style in other context other than posters, so my goal was to create a more readable typeface, that could also be used for text without losing the iconic proportions and style. The main challenge: this kind of typography is typically written in all capitals, so no existing references for the lowercase. Therefore the first step was to understand the shapes, by studying old Roman inscriptions and revisiting calligraphy.

To improve legibility I first adjusted some proportions of the capitals, bringing them closer to the Roman capitals, thus making them easier to read at smaller sizes and longer texts without compromising the style. I also created a more playful stylistic set to use the original traditional proportions in more display-oriented scenarios.

Another distinctive feature are the capital ligatures. Additionally I added contextual alternates to bring more life to the text by elevating the vowels when nearby other key letters, achieving the traditional look of this style.

After that, it was time to expand the family. Working first on the Black and then on a creative and more expressive display version which focused on highlighting the characteristic of the serifs. By giving the serifs more weight than to the stems distinct spots appeared which helps the rhythm in the reading.

Finally it was time for the Italic. Just like the lowercase letters, there is no historical reference available, so the most important thing was to pick up the pen and ink and start again with calligraphy to understand the ductus of each letters and then adapt the Regular to the new Italic style. As the last step I created the black version for the italic, now everything is ready and all it remains to do is infinite fixes trying to make everything the best it could be.

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