A Scanner Darkly | A Designer’s Life

From Vimeo: The inspiration for this typeface came from the epigraph on a frame of a nineteenth century painting. I was fascinated by the peculiar capitals of the inscription. The high contrast, and the overall quirkiness, especially the tail of the R and the oblique stems on the M, was interesting.
I decided to draw a display font with high contrast and a vertical axis, in a reference to the transitional form. Still I wanted to capture the spirit of the original letters, which to me are so imbued with Romanticism. This approach allowed for some exuberance on the regular style, but also led to more calligraphic letterforms in the italic – in which "the flow of the curves" lead the way.

Typeface design: Rui Abreu

«Boredom, the ultimate luxury.»

«I looked at your status:
“In a relationship”
“In a relationship”, an earthquake hit me.
Your status had changed.
You'd never quirked about this, couldn't drag my eye away,
the words on the screen.
Nothing's set between us but you just weren't that keen.
“In a relationship”, plain Helvetica.

So walk away and… let it go.»

«Look at that. Picked them up from the printer's yesterday. Good coloring. That's bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail…»