Why typefaces don’t have to be faceless.

Here at Purple, we believe that a typeface can really accentuate a brand’s character and capture its distinct personality. And over the years, we’ve had the chance to create some wonderful bespoke typefaces, for brands like Glenfiddich, RNIB and Chameleon to name just a few.

So, when it came to reimagining our Purple logo and typeface, we took a look at everything we’ve learnt along the way to design something that really expressed our unique approach to creative.

Here are our top five rules for creating and critiquing typefaces and typography.

Rule 1: It's easier to read the top half of letter forms.

There’s a simple experiment you learn at design school. We distinguish more information from the top half of letter forms than we do from the bottom half. So the descenders, or dropped ps and ys, aren’t as essential for understanding. (Thank you, Ron Bray and Preston Polytechnic.)

Rule 2: It’s best to judge letter spacing upside down.

The mind is one big trickster. Once we know how to read type, we develop a kind of reading muscle memory, so we fix things automatically in our heads. Without realising. That’s why it’s better to judge letter spacing upside down, because then we see the shapes, not the words.

Rule 3: We fill in the ______.

When reading, we often know what’s coming next through a mixture of experience and context.

Some type enthusiasts argue that we read just as much in shapes as we do in letter form. Here, the word ‘pink’ has been blocked out but you still have a pretty good idea what the word said because of what’s called the 'bouma shape. 

This is one of the reasons why proofreading is such an art. It’s reeeeally easy to miss typos in text if the bouma shape is what we expect.

Rule 4: (And perhaps the most crucial). If it’s trickier to read, it’s more interesting.

When you have to work a little harder to see the meaning, rather than just glancing at text, you get hooked; you have to decipher it. Take the BBC Drama logo for example. It uses cut-away type to keep your attention, reflecting its slogan: drama to get your pulse racing.

Japanese designer, Masato Nakada took the idea of dissecting letterforms to the extreme, creating experimental website: Typesnap. It allows users to write words using only half letters. It’s an interesting experiment that pushes the boundaries of legibility. Although Nakada says speed reading was never his main intention for the project, it is a potential way to get around pesky character counts.

Bonus rule 5: If it’s harder to read, it’s easier to remember.

The psychology behind reading type shows that if we take longer to process it, we’re more likely to remember it. It’s why a team from RMIT University created ‘Sans Forgetica,’. It uses breaks in the type to cause the brain to engage in deeper cognitive processing.

What does it mean for Purple?

All our research showed us that the real secret to a successful font is intrigue. As Stephen Coles notes in Typographia, ‘readability’ doesn’t just mean, ‘can you read it?’ but, ‘do you want to?’ Put simply, if a reader is fascinated by a font, they’re more likely to really engage with it.

For our font, we knew we wanted something visually interesting, and we were happy to push the boundaries of legibility a little, based on what we had learnt from the history and the science.

The result is Purple Display. It’s a knowing nod to a lot of monoline, geometric display fonts we admire, reborn. By carefully carving out sections of each letter, we’re encouraging playfulness and curiosity, and reflecting our brand purpose: ‘Creating Fascination’.

We’ve created three alternative characters per letter to keep intrigue up and repetition to a minimum. It’s also digital-first and fun to animate, morphing and changing to reveal new things. Even we don’t know quite where it’ll go next. Watch this space.