F37 x Superfried – Developing Marbles into a typeface
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Back in 2016 a little typographic idea I proposed for a New York magazine project was turned down. That little idea was recycled and grew into a big personal project called Marbles. Marbles began as a very organic, fluid experimental set of 2D numerals. Further experimentation led to 3D renders, the style being adapted for submission to the Secret 7" charity project, numerous press features and even a Creativepool award for typography. The project truly demonstrated the power of personal projects and to never discard a good idea.
In addition to the numbers, I had started to develop some of the letters for a promotional Superfried sticker. But despite this, I had never imagined this typographic experiment would ever work as an actual typeface since the character forms were so complex and eccentric.
Seven years later I reached out to Rick Banks – founder of renowned type foundry F37 – re potential collaboration on a project. I had been a fan of both his design agency and type foundry for many years. I was totally unaware that they were in the process of developing a new offering – F37x. For this new collaborative project F37 develop the typographic ideas, designs and experiments of external creatives through to complete typefaces. Rick suggested that Marbles could be a suitable candidate. I was completely shocked, but immediately jumped at the opportunity.
I was quickly working with one of their team – Rodrigo – who made the process very simple. Whilst creating the additional glyphs, it became clear there were numerous ways they could be re-drawn. In the original numerals there was a complex and simplified route, so two styles were developed, the latter being more practical for use at smaller scale.
As the build progressed, so do did the volume of potential designs for the glyphs. Since the typeface would be solely uppercase, we gained a completely unused lowercase. With this in mind it was decided that we should take the opportunity to create a secondary set of characters for each typeface. We now had the potential for four styles and two typefaces.
Capitalising on the opportunity to add additional styles and glyphs led to an extremely versatile typeface family which allows the user to truly experiment – reflecting the personality of the original concept back in 2016.
