Building out the font was a time-intensive process, Bentel tells us.

"The main work came in sourcing accurate, high-quality vector logos—in color, and black and white—for each of these brands. Some brands do a good job giving access to their logos and branding, but most don't," he says.

The team gave themselves a few goals/constraints, says Bentel:

1. Only use letters that are used as stand-alone branding elements. This meant we couldn't just extract a letter from a logo composed of multiple characters.

2. Make the font as legible as possible—within reason, of course! We mixed and matched logos to find the set that worked best with each other and workshopped it with a couple of type designers along the way.

3. Use the most recognizable current logos possible.

4. Make awesome ligatures. Try typing "cool cooool coooool."

"We broke these rules a few times when it became almost impossible to satisfy each of them," Bentel admits. "For example, I challenge you to think of a company that uses the letter 'I' as a standalone legible logo. We searched far and wide and could not find any recognizable, legible logo! We opted to pull the 'I' from the classic IBM logo, breaking rule 1, and the 'i' from Lenovo's predecessor iomega, breaking rule 3."

Bentel and the Hello Velocity team were thrilled with the results.

"In the end, I think Brand New Roman is pretty aesthetically compelling, which makes sense given all the time, money and design that has gone into crafting each of these logos for the purposes of standing out," he says. "With Brand New Roman we are making them work together."

Below, check out some imagery from artists who've been playing around witht he font.

Nikolas Bentel

Declaration of Independence