Typographic Voice
For my exploration of typographic voice, I chose the word “purity.” To me, purity is simple, clear, and cohesive. It feels patterned, without many flourishes, but that does not preclude serif fonts.
Orator STD is a typeface that only has uppercase letterforms. Because of this, I thought it captured my idea of the simplicity, uniformity, and clarity of the word purity. The letterforms are also very basic, mostly without serifs, and the font is monospace. The monospacing creates an even, patterned look about the words, which along with the wide kerning contribute to the clarity of each letter.
The second typeface I chose was Glober. This has a thin line weight in comparison to its letter width, and the line weight is constant throughout the word. This lends to a heightened attention to the simplicity of the lines that make up the letterforms, and a little less of the letters themselves. The letters are also uniform in appearance since they have been deconstructed into lines. I think this is the most successful font at conveying purity.
Simplifica, as per its name, is also a simple typeface. It is not the most simple, since it has small serifs on some characters such as the r and the i, but the overall concentration of capturing the essence of each letter to differentiate it from other similar looking letters creates a sense of simplicity. Small decisions such as the straight right side of the p to match the straightness of the u and the serifs on the r and the i serve to pull the font together as cohesive. This typeface also looks like one that an indie startup would choose to advertise their pure water.
Of all the typefaces I chose, Lucida Sans Unicode was the most neutral. It is the most likely to be used for writing a paragraph instead of a header, and so is arguably the most “simple.” It conveys information clearly and differentiates between different parts of letterforms with different line weights to allow for ease of comprehension. It can be seen as a “default” font, and so has a purity in that sense.
For this typeface choice I went for a more complicated looking font. Script-like fonts go against what I considered “purity,” but in this case I thought it worked. Cursive writing has a sort of romantic connotation, which is tightly linked with the concept of purity. Snell Roundhand depends less on the idea of purity of an object and more on purity as a human concept.
