Citrus Woodblock is a typefamily I quickly threw together in a few days for a larger advertising campaign for DC Cider Fest.
They were designed using images of woodblock type as a reference. I found images of various woodblock type online and cleaned them up in photoshop. I then ran an image trace in Illustrator to save time and cleaned up problematic glyphs. After some research, I discovered FontForge as a free tool for font creation. I imported my SVGs and adjusted the spacing and sizing roughly by eye. I had limited time and was going for a grungy/hand-made feel so it didn't matter if the spacing was perfect. Any imperfections I was willing to fix later in Illustrator or InDesign. I wanted to make a couple more typefaces for the family but ran out of time.
The typefamily is named Citrus Woodblock as I wanted to invoke the feeling of wood made from a fruit tree since it was designed for a cider festival.
The Heavy variation features a few lowercase characters with more texture to imitate ink not fully transferring. I unfortunately only had the time to create 4 characters with this effect. This typeface was used as the logo for the event.
The Western variation had numbers and some punctuation which Heavy was lacking. This was primarily used for extra flavor in the design.
These fonts were paired with Teeshirt, Trevor Eb, Rock Grotesk, and Aldivaro Stamp to achieve the hand-crafted aesthetic we were going for.
If I were to revisit it, I would import my glyphs into FontLab rather than FontForge as it has a better set of tools in my opinion. I would add more of the textured glyphs, add more punctuation, and redo the spacing with a more critical eye. The typeface worked in the context of the project, but it isn't polished enough that I would feel comfortable releasing it for others in its current state.
Typefaces Used
Sidewalk Ad
Sidewalk Ad
Metro Cards
Website ad
Website ad
Website ad
Bus Ad
Bus Stop Ad
Bus Ad
