Fonts as Fashion

More Than A Pretty Face

If fonts had feelings, this is how Carousel Medium would look. In its new poster series, Fontface, the Gijón, Spain, design firm Atipo created an interesting series of posters dedicated to four type designers.

For this great work they combined facial expressions and black-and-white make-up interpreting Caslon Italic, Clarendon Bold, Helvetica Bold and Carousel Medium.

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It was set up by Raúl García del Pomar and Ismael González in the beginning of 2010. After working in other graphic design, web design, and branding studios, the two partners wanted to start a more personal venture.

This new studio allows them to approach projects from different perspectives, freely combine all the disciplines they love, such as typography and type design, photography, illustration, video, and so on. Their project is a series of posters merging the expressiveness of manual gesture and type design in honor of the four outstanding typefaces.

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According to an interview with The FontFeed, “The series of posters features four typefaces designed by four outstanding designers. Through the combination of the expressiveness of manual gesture and type design, we made a brief journey through the history of typography.

"We started with an old style roman – the transitional face Caslon (William Caslon, 1725); passing via a slab serif – Clarendon (William Thorrowgood, 1845); a grotesque sans – Helvetica (Max Miedinger & Eduard Hoffmann, 1957); to a fat face didone – Carousel (Gary Gillot, 1966).

"We selected characters that show the main features of each typeface; and, most importantly, functioned well as a mask on the model’s face.”

“We believe that to create without limitations is only truly possible with a self-initiated project, and Fontface is one of them.

"This series of posters allowed us to bring together different disciplines we feel passionate about: typography, painting, photography, and video. Furthermore, we wanted to create a series of posters to decorate our studio.

"This turned out to be more successful than we expected, because we’ve had many reactions from people asking us where to get the posters. Now we are planning to sell them in a limited edition.”

Sources:
1. Atipo (http://www.atipo.es/)
2. Yves Peters, “Atipo Paints Characters on Face For Fontface,” The FontFeed, March 15, 2011
3. Design, "More than a Pretty Face, Time Magazine, April 11, 2011