‘Serifa’ poster

The brief was simple — design a poster for the typeface Serifa. While researching, I came across an interesting quote by Adrian Frutiger:

“The skeleton of Serifa corresponds to Univers… Every letter has roughly the same width… It retains the geometric, linear lines of Univers, with the addition of unbracketed square serifs, a squatter x-height and boxier caps.”

And with that, my direction was clear. Univers is a hugely popular text typeface, and Serifa — designed for display — perfectly complemented it. I cut out letters in Serifa and Univers and began laying them on top of each other. I found some interesting combinations, but ultimately found the best way to communicate my idea was using layers on the computer.

The A2 poster was digitally printed on gloss paper, giving it an x-ray-esque feel.

I began by cutting out letters and laying them on top of each other. I scrapped this in the end, but it familiarised me with the subtleties of the letterforms.

Couldn’t help trying out the very obvious ‘skeleton’ idea.

I layered each letter of Serifa on top of each letter of Univers, and funny enough, the most interesting combinations happened to be ‘S’, ‘E’, ‘R’, ‘I’, ‘F’ and ‘A’.

Some delicate typesetting and the poster was finished. The gloss stock gave it some shine, which allowed the whites to pop.