Hand-painted personality

For our latest project itsdogfood.com we needed to execute a brand led by a strong and distinctive tone of voice, so we created a bespoke typeface to bring out the brand's playful, yet very matter of fact, personality. When designing for D2C the rules of engagement are different to retail but we knew font was a tool we could use to carve a distinctive identity and apply to many different touchpoints.

We spoke to our designer Eve, who took on the task of hand-painting the font and spent a good few days surrounded by big blue letters.

“The typeface was created by painting acrylic paint onto acetate and then scanning each sheet into the computer. Painting onto acetate gives the font depth that most fonts don’t give you – we were able to capture the essence of hand-painting right down to the texture of the brush strokes. Knowing we wanted to use black bags, it was important for the intricacies of the brush strokes to be visible, giving the effect the words had been painted straight onto the bags. Characterful but very practical – summing up the brand in a nutshell."

"The letterforms themselves are based on the unique personalities of people’s dogs. We created multiple glyph and character variations within the typeface, so no word or sentence looks the same. We also created a flat digital version of the type for the website, it can be used as something functional but still have a really branded personality."

Check out the full project here!