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arepo: a typeface by Sumner Stone is a specimen booklet designed by myself that features fictional glyphs. The glyphs are meant to reflect the unique features and personality of Arepo, and are able to fit in amongst existing type forms.
I started the process by creating nonsense forms—characters that had features of English letterforms but were ultimately meaningless. From a select few, I chose letterforms to develop and shape on graph paper, pictured below.
I then brought the forms into Illustrator, further manipulating the balance and weight of the characters to match Arepo. This involved finding similar qualities between characters—for example, serifs and counters—and attempting to match them with some amount of precision. This process involved repeatedly comparing existing Arepo characters with the glyphs I was developing by inserting them into paragraphs or sentences, something I could do through Glyphs font-editing software.
