Auckland Font

I was approached by my friend Jane, who wanted me to design a font for her that she could use as a stencil for spray painting words with.

I came up with a few concepts and Jane was really drawn to this aesthetic but the original one was a lot more elongated vertically and a little difficult to read.

I took the emotion of that original idea and turned it in to a more readable font and this is what I ended up with.

I designed the alphabet by creating a method that I then applied to a template. The template is two columns side by side with a slight gap between them. Using these two columns I was able to define 24 of the 26 letters in the alphabet by applying this method I created. This method extends from the idea of chiseling letters from stone tablets to resolve words (the removal of matter) as opposed to the creation of letters by construction (the addition of matter).

The numeral characters employ the same principles as the alphabet but to distinguish them from letters I have gone for a more geometrical silhouette.
The punctuation marks were the most difficult part of designing the font but by halving the width of the two columns I was able to achieve more dynamic forms which the characters required, this also assists in the readability between what are words, what are numbers and what are punctuation marks.