A LOOK AT THE LOS FELIZ FONT FAMILY DESIGNED BY CHRISTIAN SCHWARTZ
los los feliz feliz DANIEL PETRILAK
“IF I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING, WHAT WOULD I DO?” Was the question asked in 2001 by Christian Schwartz when Emigre asked him to design a typeface inspired by the lettering found on a hand-painted sign (originally done by one Cosmo Avila) in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. “Los Feliz” immediately evokes the spirit of the city. There are various irregularities in the uniformity of the different letters in order to achieve the feeling of the hand-lettering that inspired it, as if painted on a wall by someone without formal typographical training, but reigns in the more exaggerated differences for the sake of readability. “When looking at the individual characters of Los Feliz, all you see is irregularities, which point to the struggle of drawing a typeface. You become aware of the little details that make it so difficult to draw perfect letter shapes. But when you look at Los Feliz set in text, these irregularities largely disappear.” This typeface family is more oriented for display/title/heading uses, but the “roman” typeface is not neccesarily ill-suited for body text. The Italic typefaces have extra flourishes to differentiate themselves from the non-italic ones (the serif of the lowercase Z, the descender of the lowercase G, rounder serifs on the italics) which subtly change the feel of the design, and give it the “handlettering” look. In some cases, the character is outright different in the italic version.
The difference between the italic and non-italic lower case “Z”. In the italic, the baseline of the character is given an artistic f lourish.
The difference between the italic and non-italic lower case “G”. There is almost nothing in common between the two designs.
Los Feliz Roman ABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXYZ Pack my box with five abcdefghijklmnopqr dozen liquor jugs. stuvwxyz 0123456789
Los Feliz Italic Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO PQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrst uvwxyz 0123456789
Los Feliz Bold
ABCDEFGHIJKLM NOPQRSTUVWXYZ Pack my box with abcdefghijklmnop five dozen liquor qrstuvwxyz jugs. 0123456789
Los Feliz Bold Italic
ABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopq Pack my box with five rstuvwxyz dozen liquor jugs. 0123456789