Limo Sans

Summary

Project Type

Type Design

Course

Typography 3

Tools

Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Glyphs

Timeframe

Jan – Apr 2023

Overview

Limo Sans is a typeface I designed for my Typography 3 course instructed by John Kane. In just 3 months, I developed an entire set of upper and lowercase letters, lining and old-style numerals, a complete set of symbols, multiple ligatures, and adjusted several kerning pairs. Altogether, Limo Sans has 132 characters—all of which I drew.

Pictured above is a broadside displaying each character, as well as a travel poster for Sitges, a beach town south of Barcelona, putting the typeface to use.

Through creating my own typeface, I not only learned about proper metrics and proportions of letterforms; I have undoubtedly strengthened my eye for typography. I look at type differently now—I know what it does, how people read it, and what proper and improper use looks like. This skillset is invaluable as a graphic designer because I make certain that all of my work employs type in the strongest, clearest way possible.

Process

The first characters I created were capital letters "H" and "O", as all other charaters could be derived from their curves, angles, and stroke widths.

I used tracing paper to draw the other characters by hand and then I traced and refined them in Adobe Illustrator. I formed words and phrases to test how legible and reader-friendly the letterforms were. When characters looked off, I refined them.