The world doesn’t need another typeface, but I wanted to make one anyways. Olivia Sans was made for my own design projects and my daughters’ future ones. The typeface consists of 126 glyphs and a weight range of regular to bold. It’s not much, but that’s all that was needed. The design aims for strong continuity across each glyph with consistent angles and thicks/thins. Given this was my first ever typeface I made, I decided to journal my process.
The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
A system is a system because its connections work together. As a system grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how everything works—or if it works at all. This rears its head in general unintelligibility, brittleness and unpredictability. At which point the system has officially devolved into a pile of stuff.
Unpredictability in particular is scary. Because unpredictability, is well, unpredictable. Unpredictable can result in good, bad, or horrible. It can be a combination of the three one minute, then none of the above the next. Which is chaos. And chaos is bad.
3.14159
The fairy game is fun, but it’s almost done.
We go to the mall, but don’t get a doll.
We got taught, it was quite a lot.
The four of us walked through that door.
On that first day and we all said,“hooray”!
—Fairy Game, a poem by Olivia