Portfolio—Typography: Typeface design.

Prosper is a custom display typeface inspired by a 12th Century Carolingian manuscript from the Biblioteca del Seminario in Padova, Italy. The script is characterised by its unusual spatial properties using counter spaces as well as negative space between letter pairs to house additional glyphs, thus saving space and paper.

Uppercase Prosper has recently undergone its first revision since its creation in 2016. This focused mainly on further unification of the overall appearance, the creation of consistency in stroke contrast and the removal of awkward transitions within some letters. Previously identified as too mechanic, select letters have been adapted to more organic/calligraphic shapes.

Lowercase Prosper has been inspired by Carolingian Minuscules. It is characterised by a small x-height in conjunction with elements adopted from the uppercase version in order to create unity within the typeface. The organic serifs allow for the combination of letters that are not commonly joined together as ligatures.

Special characters encompass three variations of Qs, an assortment of ligatures and a manuscle (a hand with pointing index finger), which has been commonly found in the margins of medieval books to direct the reader’s attention to important information.

The name of the typeface refers to its ability to save resources by learning from and adopting past practices, thus leading to sustainable prosperity. At the same time it shares its name with my dad. A well read, artistic, gentle, honest, delicate and sometimes quirky man, name patron and typeface share common character traits.

Prosper is a typeface that has made its way into the 21st Century, proudly upholding its medieval values of care towards the preservation of knowledge, attention to detail as well as a unity with the environment.

PROJECT TYPE

University Assignment

STATUS

Revision 1

COMPLETED IN

June 2017

SKILLS

Typeface Design