Font Specimen – Piano Sans

Piano is the first sans serif typeface I designed. The font I created is inspired, in terms of proportions and general harmony by the ‘Baskerville’ character, a typeface that originated as a Baroque Antiqua in 1754. I decided to take ‘Baskerville’ as a source font, because of the strong stroke contrasts that I found interesting and because of its, in my eyes, elegant character. Once I traced the skeleton of this character, I modified it, adding new details, to give my font new characteristics and a new look. I wanted to give my font a unique recognition value, that’s why I used irregular terminals for the vertical strokes, which are meant to give the font softness. Besides these terminals, my font is characterised with high contrast, as well as large intersections between the vertical lines and roundings. The choice of a straight axis (‘o’) and a straight crossbar (‘e’) creates another contrast to the other, softer, characters.
After expanding the strokes, ‘Piano Sans’ does not resemble at all to the source font and appears as a unique typeface, legible, but especially suitable for titles, because of its small, interesting details and its high contrast. In order to create the font digitally, I used Adobe Illustrator and its Plug-in Fontself. In order to present it, I created this specimen.