A new type publishing brand

Thanks for this great feedback, Abi and Cory. Exactly the kind of thinking I was hoping for.

The brand will be introduced as a website, so it’s screen only in its first iteration. However, I intend to expand on the type publishing business. I am taking this year to try and make it a sustainable project.

Marc, that was exactly my intention, to get away from classic names including foundry, or puns involving “type”.

I didn’t know the word as well until I stumbled across it by accident. From what I understand, binary and rarity are both relatives to arity. You are right though, it doesn’t matter if people get the actual meaning of the word, as long it conveys the sense some of you described.

The chances the logotype will be printed are very low at the moment. We are talking about a new brand that is display/screen only for the whole first year, or longer. Depending on the success of its introduction, I can think of more marketing budget, which could generate print material or ads in a print magazine. For now, the main application of the logotype will be on screen.

I tested the black and white version, increasing the contrast and impression of “light beams”, which was part of the gradient concept. I wanted something vibrant that doesn’t look too harmonic, more like it’s in motion without actually moving.

Some of you may have noticed I already polished the shapes a lot to reduce the amount of disturbing areas. The top of the yellow A was closed (white triangular gap) and the r-, t- and y-shapes had their tipping points cut off. I left the overlaps that were distinctively visible, also to keep the letter shape, such as the length of the t-bar. Had I shortened that, or cut it off where it touches the adjacent y-shape, I would have created a new shape language. I wanted to retain a sense of the original typeface design.

This logotype is not easy to tame, it lives from the contrasting, vibrant colours and the seemingly accidental overlaps that create new colour areas. It is not a very mature, polished logotype. It is young and a bit non-conformist, just like the brand itself.

Thank you, Thierry, for this reminder. This is why I asked if the name worked. I posted the logotype only to illustrate the name, not the other way around.

I have been working on the typefaces for the past four years. One of them is nearly ready, but there are still months of work ahead for it to be complete. Bot Sans and Bot Mono have all the weights, but no Italics and diacritics are seriously out of order.

take what you have, it seems totally fine, and work harder on everything else instead.

Absolutely. You were not off with your thought in brackets.

Interesting comparison, Christian. Antique Olive has a unique spirit. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the font in use (it’s on http://core-ux.com). There is one important rule I am breaking with it, deliberately, for the purpose of improving screen reading. The Sans version was born out of the Monospace version, which is not new, but also rarely uncommon. I remember Blue Monday’s Nitti families followed the same trajectory.

Thank you for these comments. The mathematical link is the source of the name. In linguistics, the word would be valency.

My goal was to find out if the name causes negative or contradicting emotions and memories, and if it has other qualities, to discover those with a quick survey among type designers. So far I’ve learned that many of you didn’t understand its meaning, but it didn’t matter, because you liked how it sounds.

Which reminds me of Google, which derives from a deliberate misspelling of Gogol, the Russian mathematician. It’s a historic source with no meaning whatsoever to the average Google user today.

“The number of things applicable to something” seems a pretty good description to me, for a type publishing house interested in a fresh approach, looking for variety and evolution. That said, with a name coming from a rather dry source, I think the spirit and life needs to come out of the product.