Brown Arts Institute
A performative variable font for a new art journal’s visual identity
Movements Variable is a structural typeface that fluidly animates across slant and weight, in response to Brown University’s newly-built performing arts center.
Popeyes Louisana Kitchen
A lively script from sign painting
Chicken Script is a spirited custom typeface for Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, inspired by scrappy sign painting from New Orleans. It’s packed with alternates and special features to maintain an energetic and natural flow.
Brown University Athletics
A refined take on collegiate letters
We created a custom font in two styles for Brown University Athletics’ wide range of applications in apparel, signage, and screens, with language support appropriate for the university’s international community. We also provided refinements to the department’s existing wordmarks to align better with the new typeface.
Panera Bread
A robust variable font with the organic qualities of handwriting
Starter Script is a handwriting script for Panera Bread, bringing a friendly yet polished feeling to their branding. We developed a custom variable font to offer optimized legiibility in a wide range of uses.
Select Custom Fonts
Eduardo Danilo’s dramatic redesign of El Universal, a leading Mexico City daily, introduced Cyrus Highsmith’s Zócalo. The original text, display, and banner series was tuned for distinct character frequency and repetition when set in Spanish. Nicholas Kis’s oldstyle and C.H. Griffith’s classic newsface Ionic No. 5 inspired the sturdy text while the “energetic character of Mexico City” influenced the display and banner.
Cyrus Highsmith drew Scout and related logotype for Geraldine Hessler’s redesign of Entertainment Weekly. The large family marks the magazine’s first significant typographic update in a decade. Captions and sidebars are set in Regular and Bold; Light, Black, and Condensed styles form the backbone of the display. Scout’s form derives structural elements from both new & old: DIN, Venus, and Cairoli.
Cyrus Highsmith designed Salvo Sans & Salvo Serif (originally called Boomer Sans & Boomer Serif) as one series to tie together the designs of the AARP’s various publications. Together the Salvos illustrate the guiding sentiments of design director Courtney Murphy: “Hopeful, informative, alive, embracing and delightful. The right words draw people in, but on a subconscious level the typeface does that first.”
Kiosk in Spanish is Quiosco, the name of a second type series (after Prensa) designed by Cyrus Highsmith that follows W.A. Dwiggins in deliberately contrasting character outline with the counter shape. Highsmith addresses the narrow news column by bringing new life to the forms of a newspaper text face while adding nothing to character width. Quiosco permits more compact wordspaces with no loss of readability. It was commissioned by La Prensa Gráfica.
Biscotti was commissioned in 2004 by Gretchen Smelter and Donna Agajanian for Brides magazine. “We want a typeface that makes the reader feel pretty; it should capture the voice of this happy occasion.” Cyrus Highsmith has prepared a radically simple descendant of the flourished engraved scripts traditionally deemed suitable for such formal occasions, a 21st century typeface that captures the smiling spirit of these classical forms.
The cross between calligraphy and and sanserif is rare, inhabiting territory between Hermann Zapf’s Optima, classical sans structure with a calligraphic spirit, and Warren Chapell’s Lydian, classical calligraphy without serifs. Cyrus Highsmith claims adventurous new ground with Amira, a letterform that pops from the page with an angled vitality that both welcomes and surprises readers with bright new rhythms and texture. It was commissioned by Natural Health magazine.
Our Custom Services
Custom Typeface Design
We specialize in creating original designs. Through our collaborative process, we create a typographic voice that uniquely expresses your visual identity while carefully considering your functional needs across communication platforms. We will work together to determine the styles, character set, and special features specific to your custom typeface.
Logos and Wordmark Design
We can work with you to create and refine custom logotypes and wordmarks aligned with your brand. Our logo and wordmark designs consider relationships with the typographic palette and the overall visual system. We also offer designing multiple versions of the logo for optimized legibility at various sizes.
Typeface modification
We have a large library of existing typefaces that can be customized to your needs — these can be great starting points for a new design. This process can be a more efficient and cost-effective strategy to tailor a typeface within a tight timeline.
Variable Fonts
Variable fonts allow us to deliver a single font file containing a range of styles. With our expertise in the design and production process for variable fonts, we can ensure that all points of the full design range perform as well as the static instances, while offering a lot more with the format. Variable fonts thrive on digital platforms, activated through animations and web typography. Read more on our article on the possibilities of variable fonts.
Language Expansion
We’re an internationally-oriented foundry: We have the infrastructure to offer Greek and Cyrillic support by default, and the option for collaboration with Morisawa for Japanese support.