A Study in Placemaking Typography
2026
Letters & Landmarks
I designed a custom typeface inspired by letters found on historical signs around Downtown Denver to reflect the typographic persona found there. This project explores typographic personas, or how typography can embody the look and feel of a place, through the design of an original typeface family.
Project Overview
Crackle Antiqua began as a study of prominent lettering found throughout historic Downtown Denver.
I pulled characters from ghost signage, storefronts, hand-painted type which then evolved into an original typeface family. Individual letterforms were sourced, redrawn, and refined into a cohesive system, a process that is ongoing as the typeface continues to develop. To contextualize the type, I designed a series of posters that reinsert the typeface into the city, exploring how it holds up in the same environments that inspired it.
The Problem
Signage is one of the most overlooked forms of typography, hand-painted, weathered, and incorporated into the place it represents. Yet it disappears as neighborhoods change. I wanted to explore how the "personality" of these signs could be preserved and translated into a functional typeface.
The Process
The project unfolded in three phases.
Scope & Sourcing: I started by defining how much of the city to pull from: beginning with an exploration of several neighborhoods before narrowing my focus to a few city blocks, so every letterform could be sourced on foot. Once collected, I categorized and organized the letters into uppercase and lowercase sets. Some letters where abundant, other scarce and a handful didn't exist at all within my chosen scope which meant designing those letterforms myself, extrapolating from the visual logic of the letters I did find. Every letter was vectorized and refined into a working typeface, which I named Crackle Antiqua given the historic nature and worn of these signs.
Application: With the typeface built, I paired it with photographs of the original buildings and signage that inspired each letterform. The posters featured the typeface itself forming sentences that were visually layered over its own source material. I had to determine a visual style to call out components of the photographs and apply it cohesively across the installation system.
Mapping & Installation: In the final phase, I built a visual grid/map system showing the approximate relative locations of each building the letters came from. This became the backbone of a 15-poster series, designed to be installed together as a cohesive spatial installation that the public could interact with to see how scattered fragments of Denver had been reassembled into something new.
Challenges
The central tension I kept returning to: how do you build a cohesive, functional typeface out of letterforms that were never designed as a system? Each letter I sourced came from a different sign, a different hand, a different era, with no shared logic connecting them. I had to keep making judgment calls about how much to preserve the individual character of each source letter versus how much to unify them into something that reads as one coherent typeface without it being too difficult to read.
Outcome
The completed project was shown publicly as a 15-poster installation, letting viewers experience the typeface by putting names and faces (literally, building faces) back into the letterforms many of them walk past everyday. This process reshaped how I think about placemaking and type design. It is less about how the letters look and more about how they are implemented into their desired space. This project was less about drawing idealized letterforms and more about capturing the specific, imperfect character of something that already exists.
Crackle Antiqua is still evolving as I continue to refine the letterforms and fine tune their relationships with each other.