Once upon a time…

It all started in October 2015, when I was one month into my MATD at the University of Reading. In one of Dr Gérard Unger’s lectures, he raised the issue of how attributes or qualities are assigned to typefaces, and whether these are inherent to the design or ascribed by our individual aesthetics and cultural background. As a follow-up to the discussion, he asked us to design two typefaces — a few characters of each, enough to showcase the core idea — to correspondingly reflect our perception of public and private. The results across the classroom were captivating. It was surprising to see the variety of interpretations of the meaning of these two words, let alone how these translated into letterforms.

Since the time we had was limited and the exercise put little emphasis on the value of the design itself, I didn’t spend a lot of time on sketching — not that I usually do; instead, I roughly outline some ideas on paper and then continue directly on the screen. My private typeface was a cursive yet angular and spiky design, comprising lowercase connecting letters. The cursiveness added the private (as in personal) note and the spikiness and angularity made it less inviting to strangers. Moreover, the way it was designed, each word image is shaped by a single outline, the black of the ink becoming an impenetrable and well secured private space.

The quick sketch for Private and the digitised version. The cuts in the counters create one continuous outline in every word, with the black becoming an impenetrable personal space. Notice how the tittle of the i joins the stem.

Contrastingly, the public design had to shout as loud as possible. I imagined it as an ultra-fat uppercase-only typeface, with letters occupying as much space as possible. The kind of type you would use to set a few characters inside a speech bubble and make a bold statement. Not thinking of any specific model, I intuitively added serifs to my sketch which due to the overall bulginess curved and merged into the stems. To keep the white space between the letters to a minimum, the serifs had to be very narrow and to compensate for the lack of width they had to be very fat. Square counters, included in the digitisation, added an extra element of dynamism.