Oleracea typeface

Date
Feb 2025-Present

Skills
Typeface design and development

University project, based on ISTD SAS brief

Built from Roboto and Roboto Serif, developed by the Roboto Project Authors and released under the SIL Open Font Licence

Beginning with the ISTD brief, 'Not Just Fleurons', I was inspired by my interest in the vegetable cultivars of Brassica oleracea to create typefaces to express its variability. Much as Brassica oleracea has eight different subgroups, my type family has eight different subfamilies inspired by each form. Typography is an effective medium here as its forms can be so different on the surface yet still have the same base characteristics.


My type specimen shows off simply the shapes I created. It provides a little information about the vegetables and creative decisions I made, but these are secondary to the display of the type. The colours are inspired by the stems and leaves of cooked vegetables, sometimes used as a full-bleed background with reversed-out text to show its shapes better. A subtle footer runs along all the typeface pages, labelling the cultivar name, its etymology and/or its classification as one of my stylistic sets.