About ITC Gema
Brazilian graphic designer Claudio Rocha continues to explore the possibilities of rough handwriting fonts in his new typeface design, ITC Gema. Like his previous work, ITC Underscript, Gema was originally written with a felt-tip pen, “but I did it in a small size,” says Rocha, “to keep the surface irregularity of a non-coated paper when enlarged for use as a display font.” He also gave Gema the visual effect of a stencil face by not quite joining some of the strokes; it's this stencil look combined with the rounded roughness of a felt-tip that characterizes the typeface. “Some characters have my own handwriting gestures, like the elongated endings of E and A, as well as the angular shape of P, D and R,” he says. “Besides that, the ligatures emphasize the handwritten style.” Rocha designed an unusually wide variety of ligatures and alternate characters, which occupy the lowercase keyboard positions in this all-caps font. |
