Ana Sofia Mariz This tracks the trajectory of an independent designer, letterpress printer, and dreamer, finding her purpose in creating unique typographic assets for a new market of contemporary letterpress arts, crafts, and other print and design-on-demand products.
It started with designing Vine, a contemporary typeface to address the needs of post-digital letterpress production. In this production process, layouts are created in software using digital fonts, and the end-relief printing occurs through photopolymer plates generated from pdf files. Therefore the critical points of my type design brief became creating a typeface that could be resilient, both in legibility and aesthetics, to the distortions that happen in high-pressure prints, especially on soft thick papers, common conditions of contemporary letterpress.
By the time I settled on a distinct design for Vine, it had gradually become clear that I had been arriving at a typeface that could have broader applications beyond the initial letterpress scope. With the flow and flexibility of its wavy stems and pointy endings echoing calligraphic gestures, the font has a distinct expression conveying a natural, friendly nature of a flexible sans.
As I reflected upon these results and moved forward into extending Vine to a multi-weight family, a new partnership with a Brazilian design studio, Versalete, expanded and transformed my initial project in ways I never anticipated. Most of all, it made me open my eyes to a new audience and marketplaces where typographic patterns and ornaments made from the organic letterforms of Vine can become unique digital assets in an era of DYI typography and design.