A custom font that added extra style options for this web tool all while accommodating technical limitations with ease.
Brand Mark is a web app that can create a logo and brand assets just by typing in your business name and pressing go. I was approached by them to create a custom font that could look like a finished brand with little to no designer intervention.
We achieved this by incorporating many swash and ligature options as well as an alternate ball set to replace some of the pointy shapes with more rounded ones. These alternates could not be accessed by their usual OpenType features because of software limitations so we specially coded them to play nice with the software.
As a small company, the budget was pretty small but we accommodated this with a non-exclusive license, which meant that I retained copyright and could expand on this typeface and release it as a retail font.
The initial brief asked for an elegant looking stencil serif. Rational, Bodoni-style letterforms seemed to make sense as a starting point and then I thinned the thin parts until they disappeared.
The final function of the typeface was to set a word and make it feel like a logo with little to no intervention so the alternates were an important part of the project. I added fancy ligatures, entry and exit swashes, and a ball stylistic set to provide more visual options.
