Escafina
scafinaby Riley Cran from Lost Type
In the summer of 2014, I started compiling samples of ‘upright script’ lettering. I had been doing a lot of research about the aesthetics of vintage signage and mid century advertising, and I found a ton of great uses of this style of lettering.
It seemed to be a part of our aesthetic landscape that had been slowly lost to time. This got me thinking about how I could create a modern re-interpretation of the style as a digital typeface.
The characterful lettering samples I had been gathering from old signs and mid century ads were drawn for a specific single use. Naturally, they often lacked thought towards a system of connections that allowed the letters to work together in unpredictable orders, as any typeface needs to be able to. I made it my goal to apply this aesthetic to a functional system of letters that harmonized, and didn’t rely on alternates to function, instead including them as a supplementary feature.
There is surprisingly little precedent, historically, for ‘upright script’ caps that feel cohesive and function well with a lowercase. For this I turned to the 1960s-70s serif swash cap aesthetic, which provided ample inspiration that matched the ball terminals of the lowercase. This inspiration also led to 3 different styles of the typeface, each with progressively thinner hairlines which change the tone considerably, and make the family more functional in different sizes and environments.
The result is a typeface with 3 styles, which range in aesthetic tone from charmingly succinct to delicately intricate. Escafina supports over 100 languages, automatic arbitrary fractions, and alternates for the ends of words to give a more natural appearance. Escafina is perfectly at home in Signage, Logotypes, Posters, Headlines and many other uses.
Multiplexing
I also wrote custom software which ‘multiplexed’ the various styles of Escafina so that they can be swapped effortlessly without re-flow, or varying word-length. Edit them below to see for yourself!
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Personal License
Pay-What-You-Want for a Personal Use License of Escafina.
Commercial License
Buy a Commercial Use License for only $55, and receive this lively risograph print at no extra charge!
Special thanks to…
My Parents, Marg and Dave. My girlfriend Heather Neale, she’s got my back. Thanks to Dan Gneiding (hand illustrations), Danelle Cheney (menu and badge design, beta testing) and Kenneth Ormandy (this website, beta testing, the push to finish this thing).
And to those who built the tools that make type design possible: Frederik Berlaen (Robofont), Tal Leming (Prepolator and Metrics Machine), Erik Van Blokland (Superpolator), PSY/OPS (Mastering), and Nina Stössinger (Word‑O‑Mat).