Lumios Marker: An Interview

Lumios Marker, coming in at #15 in MyFonts 2019 New Bestsellers list, is a freehand casual marker script that was created using Pilot Sign Pen. We learned more about the inspiration behind the design in an interview with the designer, Elena.

What inspired you to design this typeface? Were you designing for a specific use case or customer? Or were you more focused on a particular artistic vision? Or some combination of both?

I got a set of new markers and was trying out how they behave with different paper texture, angles and sizes. At some point, I was happy with the results so I focused my enthusiasm on ligatures, both Latin and Cyrillic ones. Cyrillic ligatures are the most interesting and fun part, as I believe that only someone who speaks and writes Russian (Ukrainian) can create realistically looking pairs — lots of letters look nothing like in study books.

Walk us through the process of designing this typeface. Was there anything different about it, compared to your usual process? Did it come along more easily than others, or were there unique challenges?

The process of creating a script is always more or less the same — you write, you scan, you trace, you beautify, you print it out, you fix issues, you scan, you fix curves and voila — the font is pretty much ready :)

Looking ahead, are there new projects you’re excited about? Anything you haven’t tried yet but are eager to explore?

I’m trying not to abandon the Cyrillic language support in my fonts. So hopefully, there will be more of those. I’m also loving creating serif fonts. Even though it’s quite time consuming in terms of balance, thickness, forms etc., the results can be rewarding.