A behind the scenes look at Stornoway and what sets it apart from the high contrast sans serifs. Rooted in the elegance of Scotch Roman typefaces and named after a Scottish town, Stornoway is a sans-serif that merges historical inspiration with modern design.
Scotch Roman typefaces have always appealed to me—I think they have a nice balance between rationality and humanist characteristics. These transitional serifs have features like a vertical axis, and sharp regular serifs—kinda like they were inspired by the crispness of Bodoni, but retained more of their relationship to the humanist forms that came before.
I started by looking at some old specimens of Caledonia, then I put them away and did some sketches of what I had seen. I was not aiming for a direct revival, but was instead aiming to capture the combination of rationality and humanist features. I also knew I wanted to make a sans serif design, so I left the serifs behind.
The name also comes from the story of Caledonia. I was reading about how Dwiggins named his Scotch Roman typeface “Caledonia” because it was the Roman name for Scotland and his inspiration was mainly from earlier Scotch Roman typefaces. I decided to also choose a name from Scotland and went with a town in Northern Scotland that some of my ancestors came from—Stornoway.
I started designing Stornoway during Fontathon, a type design live-streaming event held in February 2024. Over my 4 hours of live-streaming time, I did a speed-run of the upper and lowercase, which resulted in an alphabet that was pretty close to the final letterforms. This gave me a good sense of the direction I wanted to go in but I still had a lot of work to do to add all the styles, language support, and features that I include in my typefaces.
I decided to track my time for this typeface to get a better sense of how long each part was taking and counted up 200 hours spread over nine months.
When drawing the double story ‘g’ I fell in love with the schwoopy ear that was happening in the New Caledonia drawings. I ended up with an up-turned, flared shape for the ‘g’ ear and had taken that flare and applied it to a bunch of other terminals that would normally have a ball or tear-drop shaped terminal if this was a serif design. I felt like this brought in a hint of the pen and added a bit more humanist flair to the design.
I really wanted the italics to be true italics that were modelled more closely off of handwriting structures. I wanted to balance modern shapes with making sure they created a good amount of sparkliness in the text.
There were also challenges with letterform structure because I was making this as a variable font and needed to make sure the simple upright shapes could transition into their italic version. This means that there are extra points and handles in the upright version of some letters so that it can interpolate properly and change into an italic version of the letter.
I love making wide ranges of weights, so I included monoline all the way up to chonky. With the high contrast styles, the thin parts of the letters actually don’t change their weight, only the thick parts change as the weight changes. This creates a nice visual consistency through the weights.
The idea behind the low contrast styles was to create styles that could work in body text situations and make the overall family more useful. But I found that the chonky end of this style was also really interesting for display situations. I decided to make this a contrast axis rather than an optical size axis because I wanted to include the extremely heavy end of the drawings (which are definitely not great for small text).
Stornoway was a great opportunity to explore what a modern Scotch Roman could look like. I don’t know that the final result would necessarily be categorized as a Scotch Roman but it’s a really nice high contrast sans serif. I was also pleasantly surprised with how well the low contrast styles work in text situations and ended up using the Stornoway family as the main font across my new website.
I want to thank the other Fontathon participants Sophia Tai, Daniel Nisbet, Kaleb Dean, Bree Rice, Stephen Nixon, Paweł Schulz, and Daniel Lyons for being a great community of type design streamers that helped get this project rolling.
-Alanna