Tyte

Category

Type Design

Roles

Glyph Design & Kerning

Programs

Glyphs App

Collaborators

Jason Lorne Giles

How can a typeface integrate a logo’s unexpected and unique letterforms into a syntactic system of other glyphs?

During my summer internship, I applied my passion and knowledge in type design to a commercially viable typeface. Tyte started as a complete set of uppercase letters developed by Studio J Lorne’s creative director, Jason Lorne Giles. Our three-month collaboration brought together this typeface’s first five weights, ranging between Light and Extrabold.

Investigation

Proto-Tyte Bold

All Glyphs

The logo that included the first letterforms was inspired by Miami’s cityscape, characterized by sturdy architecture and swaying palm trees. Jason’s main goal when designing these letters was to express Art Deco in the front, Art Nouveau in the back. I referred to Dr. Gerard Unger’s Theory of Type Design to identify the qualities that comprise this typeface’s expressiveness.

Process

My best method for feeling out a potential typeface is through hand rendering. Without the demand for precision in digital rendering, these drafts allowed me to explore and reflect on Tyte’s fundamental elements. I started with rough ink sketches to conceptualize new forms and refined them later on sheets I designed for drafting precise outlines in graphite.

Proto-Tyte Bold

All Glyphs

With the control characters drafted out and approved by Jason, I finally moved on to plotting out the Bézier curves into the font-making software, the Glyphs App. Here, my focus shifted towards metrical and optical precision. I revised the original characters to work cohesively and re-proportioned weights and widths from A–Z and a–z.

Punctuation in relation to each other as well as parts of the alphabet

Diacritics fitted for lowercase, uppercase, and narrow characters

Symbols requiring unique adaptations for scaled-down characters

After the first month of development, Tyte required two additional months of work to go beyond the alphabet. The analphabetic glyphs needed extra research, particularly for the punctuation and diacritics essential for multilingual support. In total, there were 334 glyphs, which I later redrew as a lighter weight. During this phase, I also adjusted the spacing between letters and kerning pairs, resulting in two master weights that created five distinct weights.