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.
Victoria Rushton, Occupant Fonts’ Custom Fonts Director, was asked by creative agency Jones Knowles Ritchie to create a lively connecting script typeface as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen brand. It had to play nicely with their existing brand typeface, a friendly sans, as well as an existing small library of bouncy lettering and illustrations, while still having its own personality and charm.
It was important to Popeyes that the typography and illustrations be rooted in Cajun culture. JKR commissioned a sign painter in New Orleans to create samples of loose, gritty and spirited lettering. Our job was to transform that into a clean and unified system, while keeping plenty of variation, bounce, and inky charm.
Though tempting to digitize the samples just as they were, we instead took everything apart, hand-picked the best instance of each letter, and used each as only a starting point. The result is a much more thoughtful, nuanced take on the lettering.
At this stage, we experimented with combining inky edges and more polished curves. However, we slowly kept backing off from the rough texture until the finish was completely smooth. Eliminating these fussy details allowed us to focus on nailing the bouncy, gestural qualities of the letterforms, and also meant the typeface would work better as smaller sizes.
In a script typeface with such a loose, eccentric flavor, two identical glyphs next to each other will call too much attention to themselves. We opted to include three alternate versions of each lowercase letter: a default and alternate which cycle between each other, and a third variation which appears only at the ends of words. Some additional OpenType programming ensured that two duplicate glyphs would never appear side by side, and made it unlikely for duplicates to appear nearby as well.
We made alternate numbers to avoid the same duplication trap. In addition, we included bonus features involving the dollar sign, decimal points, and underlines that imitate sign painting conventions.
Finally, there are two sets of capital letters. The defaults are straightforward, while the alternates are cursive-inspired and more dramatic, to be used when the situation calls for something more eye-catching.
Chicken Script is being used across packaging, social media and in-store signage, as well as in the Popeyes app and television spots. Thanks to the quality of the hand-painted source material and the different types of alternate glyphs and feature programming, the typeface provides a lively addition to the brand’s existing typography and imagery.
