Olga Vasik

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Psycho is a free-speerited display typeface with a taste of art-nouveau and psychodelia. Meant to be used in all the wierd, crappy, non commercial, underground and self-printed designs. Comes in 4 weights.

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Art-noveau is one of the most underestimated fields in modrern type design, mainly because art-nouveau typefaces usually vague and inconcictent and doesn’t look practical in a present age. But the main idea of art-nouveau typography was to make type more human, more alive, more fluid and less mechanical, that’s why Art-Nouveau typefaces was a main inspiration of 60’s-70’s psychedelic design, and that’s why this topic seems so attractive to me.

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Creating Psycho was a long and dusty road with more questions that answers on it, with not so many sources to look up to and not so many solutions to steal. I had to figure a lot by myself with a help of our beloved instructors and build a system from a scratch, i had to try out dozens different solutions and letter shapes before i found those that might work together well. The main challenge of creating Psycho was to organise and systematise something that is very inconsistent at the first glance but has very wild and attractive personality, to find a weight distribution system that works (i’ve tried 3) and to find a particular shape for each letter that works inside of this system.

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Psycho has a unique weight distribution system, a mix of an oblique axes (that made my life a bit easier) and main stem shrinking (that adds art-nouveau sense) and this system hugely affects all the letter shape choices. Lettershapes designed in the way to communicate with each other, to create an ornament and solid movement of a white space.

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I’ve started to design from the bold weight and struggled for weeks, couldn’t find a proper solutions for all my problems. But then i’ve switched to the light and process got much faster. After that i intarpolated my thin and bold masters and got 2 additional weights.

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