In most type design, a bit of the designer’s personality is imprinted on the design. This might show through in certain characters, the way they treat their terminals and tails, the way each character interacts with the next. And sometimes the imprint is a little more… direct.
A little while back, we here at the ‘Shop were admiring the new
FF More by
Łukasz Dziedzic. As we were exploring the character set to see what sort of interesting glyphs could be highlighted in the newsletter, we found this charming fellow. You’ll sometimes see a foundry’s mark as a glyph in each font, and occasionally a seemingly unrelated dingbat will make an appearance. But this masked character seemed unique, and we wondered: is he hiding in all of Łukasz’ designs?
We jumped over to
FF Clan, one of my personal favorites. And we were delighted to find, buried deep in the character set, an entirely different masked face. Even more intrigued, we searched through each of Łukasz’ other typefaces:
FF Good,
FF Mach, and
FF Pitu, and sure enough each design had its own little avatar, each with their own personality befitting the typeface.
We’d forgotten all about these little Easter eggs, but thankfully we weren’t the only ones to uncover them. Adam Twardoch did, and he made great creative use of them. His inspiration led to this series of Planet of the Apes posters, also using FF Mach:
Head over to Adam’s Flickr page for more excellent work. Also check out this diagram on FontFont’s Flickr page, which shows every weight variant of every masked floating head from Łukasz’ families.
