Olympic
Olympic An original typeface designed by James Coker
Š2012 Anderson, SC Published by James Coker Olympic created by James Coker
Table of Contents
4 6 8 10 12 14
Concept and Uses for Olympic First Thoughts Base Shape Character Sets Numerals and Symbols Maiden Flight
Concept Olympic is based off of a combination of Kabel and Optima. Both of these typefaces are very complex on their own but I really felt that they complimented each other nicely and could work together. I went about deciding which elements of each face I wanted to use in Olympic and chose to utilize the angles that are found in Kabel and the curves from Optima. Also, the rounded elements in Kabel are based off of circles so the outside of each of the bowls in my characters are circles with a certain degree of weight change on the interior lines which makes the counter more ovoid.
4
Kabel
+ Optima = Olympic
Uses for Olympic From the beginning I thought that Olympic would be perfect for use by an airline and that idea began working even better for me when I learned that Kabel was actually designed for use by the travel industry. Once I pinned down where I was going to be using my typeface I began to think of airline names and, while the name Olympic didn’t come until later, I made the decision early on that the design was reminiscent of Greek architecture. It was then that the name Olympic came to me. It seemed to fit perfectly so that is now both the name of the fictitious airline and my typeface.
First Thoughts
Because Kabel and Optima are both sans-serif faces Olympic naturally turned out to be sans as well. That doesn’t mean that the option of it being a serif face wasn’t explored however. Actually, a few of the original drawings were interesting but the serifs were ultimately removed.
6
First Thoughts After the serif or sans decision was made I needed to decide how the letterforms would sit relative to the baseline. At first I was basing the bottoms of the letters off of Kabel. It’s very subtle but many of the characters are angled on the bottoms. On my typeface this made the letters appear too playful which in my case was not what I was wanting. I changed these characters to be flush with the baseline and it made a tremendous difference in all of the characters.
Base Shape
Starting off I knew I needed one shape to unify the typeface and so that it would be known that each character is a member of the same face. At first that shape was going to be the circle from Kabel. I began looking through the characters to find something that would repeat in many characters. What I found was that the majuscule I was something I could go off of. This shape was even adapted to make the majuscule A. The A was in turn doubled to give me the majuscule M and it was flipped to give me the majuscule W as well as the majuscule V.
8
Base Shape The base shape actually went through several modifications before it became what it is now. At first it went below the baseline and the angle was very steep. I didn’t like how jagged it was making the letterforms look so I shortened the angle and that looked much better. At one point I even considered having the angle face the other way but that didn’t even make it to the drawing board. Eventually the basic shape ended flush with the baseline.
Majuscules
10
Miniscules
Numerals
12
Symbols
Maiden Flight 14