ODISSEIA: A Monospaced Typeface Made On Earth.
Our latest release, Odisseia is a humanist monospaced type family with 4 weights with matching italics, totaling 8 styles. It carries a style and features that fits well for the use of monospaced fonts in brand identity as well as the tried and true use of the style for coding and computer terminals.
The genesis of most of the typefaces we’ve designed at Plau is client brand identity work. With Odisseia this was true once again. A Brazil based architecture firm wanted a sleek, minimalist, northern European look to go with their tropical name: Leblon Arquitetura.
We were eager to design a monospaced type family, so we arranged with our client from the get go that we would deliver a typeface-as-identity project, later to be expanded into a complete family.
Designing in MonoSpace
With monospaced font families all the letters — no matter how light, heavy, narrow or extended they are — must occupy the same width. Lowercase m and w sometimes need a radically different approach in each extreme master. Narrow ones like lowercase i and l may need serifs. The goal is to make the light/dark value even throughout. Forget stem weight and math, it’s the type designer’s eye judgement what matters the most in the end.
Finding these solutions and working through these compromises is a lot of fun. Plus, no kerning needed, yay!
The name
Odisseia’s name came really early in the process — and with a pun: a (mono)space Odyssey (Odisseia means Odyssey in Portuguese). We are big fans of 2001 at Plau, and during the process I read through the whole book series by Arthur C. Clarke — it's wonderful, go read it! It provided us with so many references that we could end up finishing the landing page in Africa Tower, 3001 (where of course, our typeface would probably be obsolete for the Anglish language).
Legibility and style
Another goal in making monos is differentiating similar letters as much as possible from each other. Take O/0 and 1/l/I for example: if they are made like Helvetica, it’ll be hard to know which is which. Having distinct shapes and features such as slashed zero can also help a great deal.
Sometimes it all comes down to style, and that’s where alternate glyphs enter, like in the case of changing between a double story lowercase a and its “schoolbook” version. Or the other way around in the italics.
Symbols in monospaced typefaces are particularly important, since they are often used in computer terminals and coding in environments of usually smallish type and big need to quicly decipher bumps and hickups. One lesson we learned by studying other designs such as Atlas Typewriter and other excellent examples was to make the asterisk and other symbols bigger than usual and in simpler forms. It really improves the result in coding software.
Making type, selling type, telling a story
Making typefaces can look easy when compared to selling it. At no other time in history this is more true than today. The sheer quantity and quality of the work being produced is overwhelming.
We created a pretty cool Wimbledon-Live-Score-real-time-fed landing page with Tenez (our previous release), and decided to make one for Odisseia too. We also wanted to test the family's flexibility, and ended up thrilled about its performance in many different situations.
A launch site for the beginning of a typographic Odyssey
For the mini site we drew inspiration from the amazing work of Grilitype and their wonderful GT-America site, as well as work being done by David Jonathan Ross and other designers pushing forward new ways of licensing fonts, which intend to make buying type easier and more flexible on the user.
The launch site is all about space, literally and metaphorically: we had so much fun designing the images, videos and features! From space food to spaceship displays, you can see Odisseia in all its splendor.
Universal licensing through Plau’s website
We wanted to make adding Odisseia to a shopping cart as simple as clicking a link, so we’ve made a decision to use Universal Licensing, a new licensing model that’s sprouted up recently from many independent font vendors. Universal means you get Desktop, Webfonts and Ebook rights all at once and with a single price. Small to large businesses get App license in addition to the others, a darn good deal for everyone.
Making a typeface requires a dedicated crew, here are the fine humans who made Odisseia:
- Type Design: Rodrigo Saiani, Flora de Carvalho
- Specimen: Rodrigo Saiani, Lucas Campoi, Flora de Carvalho, Carlos Mignot
- Illustration: Flora de Carvalho, Lucas Campoi, Carlos Mignot
- Acknowledments: Raphael Carvalho, for his amazing motion work in the star map, Gustavo Saiani for his JS coaching.
View more details and license Odisseia through these fine distribution partners:
Rodrigo Saiani is commander/bézier specialist @ Plau, a type identity and brand foundry from Rio.
