New on the Catalogue: Velero and Jobito
Opposite in nature, both full of personality
Some people ask me how I choose the next font I’m gonna make. I usually think of what’s missing in the store, or try stuff I haven’t tried before. In this case, Jobito is a very rounded typeface that is also reverse contrast. I had only done one reverse contrast font in the past, Raro, but it’s a sharp and pointy font, so I wanted to do the opposite this time: make it friendly, joyful and built with almost no straight lines.
For Velero, I wanted to experiment with another cursive type. Gabetes was the monoline one, and Neopol Script is fairly monoline too. But they both look modern and sleek in their own ways. So I wanted to go old, nostalgic and eroded. Textured fonts have been missing from the catalogue for quite some time. Velero is a love letter to penmanship with a Caribbean twist, and rough strokes as if they had been eaten away by salitre, the salty sea air.
The construction process for both was quite different. Jobito was about balancing curves, looking for ways to respect the horizontal counterforms while staying true to the roundness, and searching for letterforms that felt unique and juicy. As always, Cyrillic is on my mind when creating fonts, at least for the last three years or so. But this time it was special, because Cyrillic is normally a writing system that is expected to be square and mechanical. Transferring those strokes to the bubbly realm was fun and challenging.
Meanwhile, when I felt stuck on Jobito, I worked on Velero, which happens to have an entirely different construction process. For this one I had to buy a broad nib pen and explore some handmade strokes. I spent hours researching established cursive forms like Secretary Hand and Spencerian Script, and with a bit of shame I confess I love the American business hand of the Palmer Method. I also looked at sites like Primarium and Art. Lebedev Studio’s Cyrillic library. But the more references I consumed, the more I wanted to create my own system, one that reflected the warmth of the island. Explorations went on and on, on paper, until I was ready to move to Glyphs.
For each letter I had to repeat several specific steps: draw the stroke, apply Rainer’s BroadNib filter, adjust, apply an offset, adjust, apply the roughen filter, adjust… until the letter came alive. If only that was all! Like any cursive, there’s a bunch of code happening behind the curtain. Velero has more lines of contextual substitutions than Gabetes and Neopol Script combined! It took hours and hours of testing. Oh, but the result is just mesmerizing. Seeing how the letters connect, and admiring the flowy strokes that evoke wind, sand and serenity, makes it worth the hard work.
By the way, I’m still not done with Velero. I wanted to launch the Latin support first, because otherwise it would take a while for me to publish it. The Cyrillic is almost there. Because it’s a writing system that is not native to me, it takes a lot more research for each letter than its Latin counterpart. It’s such a long process that I stop and go back to another font. Actually, in the breaks I took from Velero, I finished Jobito, and that’s just the life of an independent type designer who’s also building his own store.
Anyway, I hope these new fonts find some projects to shine in. If you ever use them, drop us a line and show us the result! We’d love to include some use cases in our In the Wild gallery.