Fontsmith FS Sally Triestina

 "Influenced by original Italian typefaces, Astrid chose FS Sally, which she describes as “a beautifully crafted, elegant typeface that closely reflected the ones used by my father”. FS Sally is a slender serif typeface with an adaptable rhythm. “We also thought it would be the best one to create a high contrast in type,” elaborates Astrid. From there, Astrid and her senior designer Igor, coincidently also from Trieste, began to draw. “We did everything by hand which we normally do with all of our projects, suggesting ideas to Fontsmith with pencil and paper.” The idea was to merge two typefaces, representative of Trieste’s split personality in both architecture, its natives and Astrid herself. FS Sally showcases a gentler side, attenuated against a bolder font, portraying the block letters from Astrid’s father’s archive. “We started to really look at the typeface in detail,” says the designer, “we looked very very closely to decide the perfect cut to create a high contrast typeface”. The process from this point mirrors the way Fontsmith tailor their fonts through Brandfont, “a ping pong game in-between us and them,” Astrid describes. Jason Smith, Fontsmiths’ founder explains the approach to the brief similarly, “The process was really collaborative with a lot of back and forth. We were open to their ideas and they were open to ours so it was a really enjoyable process.”

To accommodate Astrid and Igor’s original sketches Fontsmith’s Senior Designer Fernando Mello adjusted FS Sally Regular, increasing the contrast, “to make it closer to the Modern style,” Jason explains. “He then needed to redraw the top serifs, making them a bit longer and more in tune with the higher contrast. The new modified version of FS Sally Regular was then spliced with the Bold version around the midline and the kerning adjusted. Importantly, not all the letters worked first time round so we had to make subtle changes to the design. For some of the letterforms we provided two alternatives so Astrid could discuss which one she preferred. We also extended the character set to include math symbols and punctuation to make a fully functioning typeface.”"

I absolutely loved this typeface by Fontsmith, and it caught my eye as soon as I saw it on their Instagram. I think the quirkiness of the font is really interesting and I haven't seen anything like this before. It obviously wouldn't work as a copy typeface but would be nice to use as a display typeface! I think it could fit into quite a lot of projects as well as adding a fun and lighthearted element.