Celaraz Typefaces, The Serif Faces in Disguise

Tokotype Studio
Tokotype Design
Published in
3 min readMar 27, 2018

Celaraz is typeface with structural forms and pushes the stroke contrast. The idea evolved from the didone styles and wedge serif forms to feel explicit with the contrast remain visible and consistent on each character. The final result with contemporary styles making this typeface well-suited face for large setting display as well as the medium size design and Celaraz consists of four weights with companion italic.

Celaraz adapted based on certain tones that retained the contrast of the classic typefaces, “how we can make a design that looks like sans-serif and feels like serif?”, that’s our first thing in our mind when designing this type family. The design took part back in 2016 when experimenting between the harmonic tones of Didones styles and nineteenth-century printing type like wedge serif styles, with the addition to pushes the serif to comprise the rigid forms and straightforward proportion.

The main concept adapting from Didone contrast and Wedge Serif Forms
First draft vs latest version of Celaraz Typefaces

While working on Celaraz’s first draft, we are faced with the challenge for making the typeface aligned harmoniously, the first experiment was to add a serif that resembles a brush to make softened forms with little detail at the end. The first version goes not as expected, the typeface does not look well at the large size with strange swell curve remain visible, to avoid that strange shapes, all the main base forms was changed with more extreme approach, by changing the contrast more high with thinner stroke and adding wedge serif look alike but a bit upward forming like a rod bones.

The thinner contrast stroke remain the same on each correspondence weights

The second result is a more visible of its contrast as well as more static with a serif that radiates upward, this form looks more solid in medium and large size, but remains functional on small sizes, other particular thing is the identical contrast on each weight makes this typeface more steady as well as the small details on each characters. The family available in four weights, including light, regular, bold, and extrabold, equipped with all matching italics on each weights.

Standard OpenType Features of Celaraz Typefaces: Stylistic alternates
Cyrillic language of Celaraz Typefaces

To enrich the Celaraz’s four main weights, a standard Cyrillic character and Latin Pro encoding has been added to the family. Celaraz would fit especially for display and headline settings, but the small sizes of regular and light weight also works well as a text complement. Celaraz also includes a standard the single story of the a and g alternate character that can be found on stylistic set OpenType Features.

Celaraz is our first released in 2018, to learn more about Celaraz typefaces, check out the PDF Specimen or request the trial to abc@tokotypefaces.com. Celaraz available for desktop, web, and app licensing.

Try And Buy Celaraz Typefaces →

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Tokotype Studio
Tokotype Design

Typeface design studio based in Indonesia. We design and develop typefaces for brands & companies.