Typeface Design – Gyrosol

Like so many others, this started with me noodling around with type to create a logo. (Don’t for the life of me remember what the logo was though.) As is often my wont, I’ll type out the word and go through the font menu to see what I think has the right “feel.” One of them was Tobias Frere-Jones’ Font Bureau typeface Stereo (itself an adaptation of Karlgeorg Hoefer’s original Stereo). Well, the interior of the letters in Stereo appealed to me. I culled them, noodled around some more, the logo went in another direction, but I liked where that idea was headed. Later I went back and continued it. Took away the outer area, added areas that were missing like the counters, adjusted the X-height, fixed the spacing, kerned it and also created a lower case for it. The lower case needed to be polished up a bit more, but just never got around to it. Done in 97.

I also did some variants of the upper case. I like this as a loose, signpainter-ish typeface.