Roasted By: Jennifer Bowers
Roasted
Table of Contents
Concept 4 Inspiration 6 Geometry 8 Terminals 10 Weight Variation 12 Challenges 14 Scaling 16 Personality 18 Numerals and Ampersand 20 Solution 22 Normal 24 Bold 28 Normal Oblique 32 Bold Oblique 36 Application 40
Concept
Maxwell House’s re-branding in 2014 targeted a younger generation of coffee drinkers. The coffee brand changed its look to all sans serif typefaces with minimalistic designs and new color identification for decaf coffee. With all of these changes, older generations of coffee drinkers, the loyal customers who stuck by Maxwell House throughout the years, are being left behind. Roasted was created to help bridge the connection between the old look and the new, and to allow certain text to stand out much easier at a glance to customers. Specifically, for “Decaf” and “Caffienated” to be more easily identified on the new packaging as orange no longer means decaf to Maxwell House. 4
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Inspiration
Baskerville When first examining typefaces to use as inspiration for Roasted, I was immediately drawn to the serif typefaces. I knew that I wanted to stay with Maxwell House’s sansserif look but I also knew that whatever I chose needed to stand out. Baskerville’s extreme weight variation, with beautiful curves, simple design, tear drop terminals, and thin serifs caught my attention. Already knowing some of the concepts behind the characteristics I wanted to create in my own, I looked to Baskerville for the rest. I drew from its characteristics to create what I liked to think of as a sans-serif Baskerville. Roasted is a bit more geometric, and its terminals are no where near the size of Baskerville’s, but Baskerville will always be in Roasted’s family tree. 6
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Geometry
A Cup of Coffee Roasted is a very geometric typeface with heavy emphasis on the perfect circle. These represent the idea that Roasted was created for coffee branding and coffee is served in cups, each circle reiterates the shape of a coffee cup. Maxwell House’s new branding comes back to their earlier idea on having a good cup of coffee. Not great, not fancy, but just good.
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Aa Gg Oo
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Terminals
“Good to the Last Drop” This slogan is the second part of Maxwell House’s branding — the slogan that most people have heard for years upon years and supposedly dates back to Theodore Roosevelt’s reaction to their coffee. Roasted’s terminals are shaped like tiny tear drops to give a visual representation of Maxwell House’s slogan. Each letter with these tears has only one of them, showing that each one of those drops could be the last drop, but that it is enough.
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Weight Variation
Caffeine Jitters Those days when you don’t get enough sleep, drink one too many cups of coffee, and suddenly you’re shaky and jittery and you just know the caffeine was to blame. Roasted’s large weight variation and contrast express this feeling. The regular version of Roasted has a thinner weight variation to represent decaf and its lack of caffeine. Bold, on the other hand, has a much larger weight variation and a huge contrast which shows caffeine’s effect.
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Decaffeinated
Caffeinated 13
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The Challenges
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Challenges
Scaling When I first started sketching, my letters were very small, with my majuscules being only four grid blocks high and my minuscules being only two blocks high in my squared sketchbook. I mistakenly thought this would easily translate into larger formats with only a bit of simple math. I was wrong. Moving up to a medium sized sketch three times the original sizes worked okay, but some letters started to get a little too big. Then after discovering that I would need to scale them up again, to four times the original size, I got a little frustrated when things just were not quite the same as those originally tiny sketches. After using a circle tool, making my own circle tool, and a little help from Glyphs in the end, I was able to keep my perfect circles and have consistent sizes and weights for my letters. 16
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Challenges
Too Much Personality I got a little too excited about my letters. On a quest to have a highly symbolic typeface and show off my perfect circles, tears, and weight variation, I wasn’t looking at my typeface as a whole. B and E partied a little too hard and ended up being a little too much for the rest of the typeface. The crescent moon shapes, although they did have the tear drop terminals, perfect circles, and nice weight variation, were a little too different from the rest of the typeface and some decisions had to be made. Although I felt like I was sacrificing symbolism for legibility at the time, I can now see how much better these letters fit into the typeface. They still have weight variation and B still uses the circles, but now they finally fit in. 18
B
E
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Challenges
Numerals and Ampersand As I finished my letters and imported them to glyphs, I was extremely proud of myself and overestimated my abilities in Glyphs. I figured that I didn’t need to draw out my numerals, punctuation, or ampersand. I mean they’re only numerals, how hard could they be? Mistake number one. It was hard. It was very hard. I stuck with it and freehanded the numerals, punctuation, and ampersand, but it took much longer than expected and I had many more difficulties than if I had drawn them out like my other letters. While I do regret my process and I made things harder than I should have, I do not regret how they turned out in the end. Still using the circles, weight variation, and terminals, the numerals, punctuation and ampersand are a continuation of the concept and connection to Maxwell House. 20
When I first freehanded my numerals in Glyphs, 4 started out with a smaller triangular area at the top and no arm sticking out on the right side. And it just seemed off. It was too straight and wasn’t as large as all of the other numerals. Sure it had the same DNA as 1 and 7 but something was just wasn’t right. It was suggested to try curving the stem of the 4 some, but after trying and failing over and over again, I realized that this 4 was just not meant to be curvy. Sometimes the simplest fixes are right before our eyes, and out of an act of desperation and “why not since everything else isn’t working”, I extended the triangular area and gave it an arm on the right side. Suddenly, everything felt okay again.
The ampersand encountered a slightly different problem. While designing and attempting to freehand, I kept trying to manipulate my 8 into a traditional &. After moving back and forth between Illustrator and Glyphs more times than I care to admit, I got frustrated, walked away and asked someone else for help. She suggested looking up other styles of ampersands and using my 3 as a base instead of my 8. Lo and behold, it worked. I flipped my 3 around, extended the top curve and added a fancy little accent mark to the bottom and I suddenly had a working, beautiful ampersand.
The 7 and 4 were sister letters sharing much of the same DNA. So when something looked off with the 4, something looked off with the 7, and the same curved suggestion was made. Unlike the 4, curving the 7 was much more successful and was an easier fix than the other two problem characters. My main struggle with this new curvature was fighting with the program itself. Glyphs was not supportive of my decision to change around my numerals and made the process a serious struggle. But after powering through, I was left with a nicely curved 7.
4 & 7
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The Solution
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Regular
Decaf
MAXWELL HOUSE making good coffee since 1982
Good to the Last Drop can be found at any main grocery chain
NOT GREAT, BUT GOOD 24
ABCDEFGH IJKLMNOPQ RSTUVWXYZ
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abcdefghi j k l m n o p q rstuvwxyz
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0 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 . … , : ; “ ” -–—()!?
4 9 ‘ & 27
Bold
Caffienated
MAXWELL HOUSE making good coffee since 1982
Good to the Last Drop can be found at any main grocery chain
NOT GREAT, BUT GOOD 28
ABCDEFGH IJKLMNOPQ RSTUVWXYZ
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abcdefghi j k l m n o p q rstuvwxyz
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0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . … , : ; “ ” ‘ -–—()!?& 31
Oblique
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Oblique Bold
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By:Jennifer Bowers 2015