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sonar
typography, layout design
[ 2023 feb ]
A custom typeface built for the future.
Inspired by futuristic display fonts, Sonar is a geometric sans-serif with worlds of personality.
Process
Uppercase letters and numbers would follow the same angle guides as I began to digitize the sketches. A futuristic font started to develop from this pattern.
I used the program Glyphs to digitize the fonts and there was a bit of a learning curve. I had been using bezier curves for years before this project, but there is another level of precision behind designing a font. Additionally, things like x-height and cap height were always changing as you added more letters.
My early sketches were all over the place ranging from high-contrast stroke widths to reverse contrasting styles. I started to lean toward letters with a specific geometric angle. This is where I would develop my lowercase sketches.
When starting, I kept the idea that I wanted to make a display sans-serif; so my inspiration would come from modern, almost brutalist posters.
The final font also had a few changes including stroke width, dropping the bowl of the P, opening the counter of the O, and switching the angle of the uppercase F.
final
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