Velocity is an attention-grabbing all-caps sans serif with horizontally tight letterforms that prioritize compactness without feeling cramped. Its high degree of curvature and forward momentum make it ideal for branding and contemporary design, excelling when typeset large. With 12 stylistic sets and three sets of diacritics, Velocity easily adapts to different design environments. All seven weights are duplexed, allowing quick switches from Thin to ExtraBold when sprinting towards the finish line.
Velocity’s origins
Velocity began in late 2023, after becoming enamored by the letterforms of British Overseas Airways Corporation (B.O.A.C.) posters and associated typographic paraphernalia. Most B.O.A.C examples are restricted to capital letterforms, tilting forward at 6°, creating a bouncing baseline and rhythmic cap height.
Crafting a faithful revival of the letterforms was never the intention, as this had already been done with the typeface Fanfare. However, the skeletal structure and compact conventions of the B.O.A.C. letterforms formed Velocity’s foundation. Personality was added by rounding curves and extending stroke endings to confidently close apertures (see C and G).
From its humble beginnings, Velocity was designed to include multiple sets of diacritics for different design environments, a range of stylistic features, and duplexed weights from Thin to ExtraBold. Crafted sporadically over three years, Velocity’s initial concept remained strong throughout its design. Frivolous alterations to individual characters were avoided, and core ideas were strengthened by adding features during development. Many designers know how a great idea can be tarnished by overworked details and unnecessary decisions until what made a project special is lost. Velocity avoided these pitfalls by focusing on a few typographic parameters deemed worthy of exploration.
1 & 4. Velocity has a rounder appearance with turned-in terminal stroke endings.
2. Apexes remain wide with counter-shapes larger than BOAC letterforms.
3. Straight leg rather than curved into a vertical stroke.
The push of inspiration
Velocity’s branding began shortly after its rough initial drawings were completed. At Tandem Type, we complete every aspect of our typefaces in-house — from outlines to kerning, engineering to post-production, as well as branding and marketing. Controlling all aspects offers a thorough understanding of the interaction between each process, revealing where improvements can be made to strengthen the typeface. Everything is interlinked.
Crafting a typeface’s visual brand comes from using it, which is vastly different from designing it. Constantly switching between the roles of graphic designer and type designer improves a typeface because you’re forced to question where and how gaps in functionality exist and what should be addressed to strengthen the work. Plus, it’s short-sighted to ignore how a well-crafted visual identity can elevate a well-crafted typeface. Having branded many typefaces by Tiro Typeworks throughout the years, visual aesthetic is just as important as the outlines — providing a vehicle, a visual voice, that an audience will hopefully connect with. Outlines alone shouldn’t be relied upon to market a typeface, regardless of the weight attributed to their significance.
Velocity’s identity is inspired by the fast-paced momentum of road cycling and the velodrome. Steeply banked turns informed Velocity’s curves, while the rigidity of modern-day bike frames influenced the weld-like aesthetic of Velocity’s junctions. Bike frames are typically formed from two triangles, requiring them to be strong, stiff, and light, with variations coming from materials and geometrical differences. Velocity’s lighter weights demonstrate this concept, with open shapes that force counter-shapes to remain large, providing a rigid strength and solid foundation.
Perplexed over duplexing
Typeface duplexing (also known as uni-width or multiplex) means that each character of a font family has an identical width across the entire weight range, making it possible to switch styles without affecting the overall design layout. The benefit of duplexing is that text can be made bolder or lighter without causing re-flow, yet it requires the entire design space to be considered, and how troublesome characters can become finicky across all weights (ẞ, Œ, and Æ). Small tweaks were required to avoid certain letters becoming horizontally squished as their weight increases.
The upside of duplexing is that opportunities arise to explore alternate solutions, as cheekily adding a couple of units to comfortably accommodate a letter in the heavier weight isn’t feasible. An example of this is Velocity’s A, M, N, V, and W, all designed with horizontally elongated apexes in the light weights to emphasize the cascading/bouncing baseline, while their inner crouches gain sharpness in the heavy weights. This relationship allows the countershapes and surrounding white space of each character to retain a comfortable size across Velocity’s weight range.
3 & 4. Counters in the lighter weights become sharp in the heavy weights.
Duplexing does present some inherent design challenges, yet the user-convenience that comes from duplexing outweighs the technical headaches, and adhering to a uni-width design also avoids design paralysis from endlessly exploring creative solutions. It also came with unforeseen advantages too — kerning one weight and transposing this data to the other weights, and designing Velocity’s aero diacritics too.
Three sets of diacritics to rule them all
Most typefaces contain a single set of diacritics that harmonize with the character-set, while more extensive families containing text and display styles should include a set of diacritics for both styles — one for the Text and another for the Display. There’s nothing new to this methodology, yet Velocity’s approach is slightly different. What began as a display typeface intended to be typeset at 36 pt and above remained surprisingly readable at smaller sizes, resulting in different diacritic sets being designed to cover both ‘Text’ and ‘Display’ style parameters.
Default accents (left), slammed accents (middle), and aero accents (right).
Velocity’s three sets of diacritics are tailor-made for different typographic situations, all supporting Vietnamese and major Pan-European Latin languages. The design of the default diacritics follows the typical fare, best employed for smaller point sizes, while the ‘slammed’ accents (activated with stylistic set 1) push Velocity’s design in an unconventional direction, fusing the accent and the letter together to create a unified shape. Their design takes inspiration from in-situ signage in Europe, where the accent and letter are a single object, possibly preventing signage crews from considerable head-scratching and headaches during installation.
The aero accents (activated with stylistic set 2) mirror the standard positioning of the default accents but with a substantially lighter stroke weight, best activated when Velocity is shown large. Both the slammed and aero are vertically lower and closer to the letter than the default accents, granting the possibility for tighter line-to-line spacing. But what does this mean exactly? Substantially increasing the point size of typeface can result in certain typographic features appearing visually clunky — the vertical space between every line of text (i.e., leading) becomes chasms, and the space between letters is often reduced (i.e., negatively tracked) to avoid words appearing wide. This is particularly evident when a text typeface is displayed larger than intended. Velocity’s slammed and aero accents mitigate these issues. The aero accents offer a lighter affair, acting as a supporting element, while the slammed accents abandon typical typographic conversions in favor of an experimental approach. It’s going to be interesting to see how designers utilize each of these diacritic sets regardless of their intended usage.
Designing the slammed accents
The typical approach is to design and position the diacritics after completing the letters. Type design programs make this task straightforward via automation. The slammed accents were complicated and came with a plethora of design challenges: how should each accent connect to its appropriate base letters? And, what approach should be taken towards troublesome combinations that become visually unidentifiable? When an accent is required to touch its base letter, tried and tested methods can’t be relied upon. Instead, testing and scrutinizing the best visual approach for every accent + letter combination is required. The solution involved proofreading a multitude of Latin languages to contextually test the slammed accents and determine which heavily accented words looked odd. Troublesome letter + accent pairings were flagged and organized into three categories: redesign the letter, redesign just the accent so it works on all base letters that use said accent, or design an alternate version of the accent for edge cases where the letter and accent were visually jarring. Many letter + accent pairs got decomposed, with either the letter and/or accent requiring adjustments to achieve a desirable result.
To understand this visually, the images below highlight key problematic areas when the default accents are taken and lowered to merge with the letter: the macron substantially overlaps letters featuring long horizontal top-strokes (Ā and Ē); the circumflex’s inner crouch disappears or creates a counter-form with the letter (Â, Ê, and Ô); and some instances the tilde completely fails to connect to the letter. Most of these problems arise due to Velocity’s upward slant of horizontal strokes. As accents aren’t typically designed or engineered this way, clever tricks were required.
Velocity’s upward slant became beneficial as accents could be tilted upwards or sloped downwards without becoming disruptive or attention-grabbing to the overall design. The goal was to mitigate any major overlaps between an accent and base letter combination. This ‘rotational approach’ is most noticeable on the macron, which is tilted upwards to separate it from enveloping the whole top stroke of Ā and Ē. Multiple versions of some accents were designed — rotated either clockwise or anti-clockwise — to work better on the letter inheriting the accent. The circumflex is a good example of this. Priority was always given to creating breathing room between an accent and its letter to avoid a visually colliding mess, while also keeping a gentle overlap between both. In the end, six versions of the tilde were crafted to resolve visually problematic situations with specific letters.
1. Tilted upwards. 2. Tilted downwards. 3. Tilted downwards but narrowed to avoid clashing with the horn. 4. Tilted upwards but narrowed to avoid clashing with the horn.
Designing the aero accents
With the aero accents, decisions were made about what constitutes an accent. Should barred glyphs be thinned? And is the ogonek an accent? Well, technically no! But for the sake of completeness, aero versions were created for all barred characters (Ð, Ł, and Ø) as well as the ogonek — Polish words like gżegżółka and bezwzględność looked odd when accents were thin, and ogoneks and slashes remained heavy. When in doubt, make it thin.
The engineering of Velocity’s thin punctuation
The concept of the aero accents was extended to the barred currency symbols, fractions, math symbols, and punctuation, many being quickly created with data that already existed in Velocity’s design. Things get a little nerdy here, so come along and geek out.
On the surface, a typeface is a collection of letters, ordered in a sequence to form words, which hopefully form coherent sentences. Digging deeper, a typeface is a boring, cold, numerical data file, comprised of points positioned at specific locations. These points are connected to form curves, which define the shape of a letter’s appearance. Remember when you were a child, toiling away on a dot-to-dot to uncover a mysterious artwork? It’s vaguely similar in that dots are connected to define a broader shape. To leverage Velocity’s own numerical ‘dot-to-dot’ data, clever tricks were employed to create the aero punctuation.
As each letter of Velocity is duplexed, occupying an identical width regardless of its weight, Glyph’s Smart Component feature could be used to cherry-pick a lighter point in Velocity’s weight axis and transpose this data to the Extrabold aero punctuation. This solution was possible because Velocity’s stem widths, shapes, and metrics were obsessively managed from their inception. The black and white circled numerals also leveraged this trick, with the numerals of the former being marginally lighter than the latter to optically balance with each other. Relying on Smart Components is a clever approach, providing a quick visual feedback loop without completing repetitive and laborious processes.
Velocity Vietnamese
With some 90 million speakers, Vietnamese is always a worthy inclusion to a typeface, having been added during the production of the slammed accents. Designing Vietnamese accents requires a lot of fiddly work, yet the unconventional approach taken towards the slammed accents made the process a fruitful endeavor. It’s these challenges that type designers revel in, staving off monotony by exploring what’s considered acceptable.
The Vietnamese character-set also features stylistic alternatives and three styles of diacritics, offering Vietnamese designers a comparable level of flexibility to the Latin character-set. From stylistic features to text samples, Velocity’s type specimen outlines in some detail what’s included.
Designed by Paul Hanslow and refined by Kaja Słojewska, Velocity is Paul’s debut release with Tandem Type.
Velocity wouldn’t have been possible without correspondence with Toshi Omigari, OpenType support from Sebastian Carewe, and knowledge from Ben Mitchell and Denis Jacquerye about Marshallese. Special thanks to Kaja Słojewska for her constant support and fine-tuning of Velocity. Type is a team effort, and the support of others has helped the project become much more than its original idea.