Sobrado

¶ The idea for this font came from a postbox I saw in Ottawa (CA) that had a bilingual (english/french) signage. Since the only difference between the word “letter” in both english and french are the last two letters, these two letters for each respective language were compressed vertically and stacked on top of each other, in order to fit both languages into the same space as one word in one of those languages would occupy.

¶ In order to make this work, at least the stacked letters had to be monospaced. I decided going with two sets of widths, each one with its respective full and half height glyphs.

¶ Considering how the design strays from a more conventional application of glyphs, I quickly digitised some characters so that I could start to see how the concept would actually be implemented. This project ended up being an exercise on OpenType features, as I thought that keeping everything in one single font would simplify things from a users perspective. I also ended up adding a pseudo-random feature that mixes all four styles randomly.

¶ Linguistically, this could be a nice way to point out similarities and differences between morphemes in different languages.