Portabello Typeface

Typeface Design

Type

Collateral

Design

Animation

Graffiti aka tags in the streets, typography on the sheets, is rising within the fashion and design industry. Joining the norm as a ‘Display’ typeface, high fashion brands like Off White, and creatives like Gucci Maze are keeping it popular and it doesn’t look like it’s going to end any time soon.

It is the new 80’s grunge and is used to add a flair of rebellion and personality to what would otherwise be very safe design pieces.

Enter Portabello, a typeface misspelled from the iconic street named of portobello. This passion project was created through collaboration from myself and the Sydney street artist Jigs.

I had wanted to collaborate with Jigs for a little while now, but never found the time to. After his return from Perth, while living his best fun-employment life we finally got together for this typeface.
He originally hand sketched each letter, which I then vectorised them.
Then by dissecting parts of the letters (specifically their terminals, strokes, apexes, and vertexes) we designed a number set with additional characters and glyphs.
Using Fontself (a free illustrator plugin), we created the typeface. This helped with the adjustment of the natural typesetting, baseline alignment and the cap height to allow a consistent feel to the font.
Staying true to form and keeping the hand-done effect, Portabello has flaws, and depending on your wants will need to be manually adjusted.