Telescrittura

In 2022 I travelled to Florence for the first time in 50 years. The city is rich in examples of renaissance lettering which I might have expected to inspire new typographic projects, but in fact the letters that caught my imagination date from the 1930s and the modernistic architecture of the Santa Maria Novella  railway station. Noticing these in the last minutes before our train left the station, I refrained from photographing the letters and instead resolved to commit their defining features to memory.

The word ‘Telescrittura’ appears by the doorway of some offices that open onto the platform. The word seems to have vanished from use and my guess is that it refers to a teleprinter or similar mid-century technology.

The dimensional blocking was inspired by the much larger arcihtectural letters that overlook the main concourse 

The resulting design is an extended chromatic type family. It comprises a total of 8 fonts which can be combined in 20 different variants using different permutations of shadow, blocking and inlining. These components will be made available as separate fonts to allow the user to apply colour independently, and the typeface will also be produced as a set of colour fonts.