Responses by TIGHTYPE.
Background: Macan draws influence from the Grotesque genre of the 20th century, the industrial aesthetics of stencil typefaces and the mesmerizing rave flyers of the ’90s and remixes them into a versatile Neo-Grotesque type family. Its Stencil companion is a mashup of functionality and ornament, partially translating the functional aspects of stencils—the connectors that prevent counters from being removed from the final motif—into aesthetic features. Its bridges are both rounded and straight, functional and ornamental, and severe and quirky. Macan and Macan Stencil were developed in harmony, influencing each other’s character shapes, rhythm and proportions.
Challenges: The first part of Macan’s design process was similar to other typefaces. Once we added the Stencil version, things got more complex; we had to do quite a lot of back and forth to make sure that the typefaces’ rhythm was still harmonious—which turned out to be tricky to evaluate using the Stencil syltes—and that the “solid” character shapes would be compatible with the Stencil character shapes.
Favorite details: We’re most excited about the wide language support of Macan. Currently, Macan is fluent in most Latin languages—including Vietnamese—as well as Cyrillic and Greek. High fives go to Vassilis Georgiou (for Greek), Jovana Jocic (for Cyrillic) and Donny Truong (for Vietnamese) for their expertise and consultation, as well as Léon Hugues for his help with the production! In the upcoming months, we will be releasing additional scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew and Thai.
Visual influences: As briefly mentioned above, we found inspiration in rave flyers from the ’90s—specifically promotional flyers of Wicked Sound System, an acid house–loving crew organizing “wild and lawless full moon parties” in San Francisco in the early ’90s.
The typeface used on those flyers—Keedy Sans by Jeffery Keedy, which is included in the permanent architecture and design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York—has both rounded and straight stroke ends, creating an exciting dynamic and suggesting letterforms to be unfinished. We loved Keedy’s approach and translated it into the bridges of Macan’s Stencil version.
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