Trapobana Typeface

Trapobana is a completely bespoke semi-serif typeface, inspired by my own slanted caligraphic brush movements and designed in a single book weight. It is a display face featuring basic latin characters and stylish variants for some character and puctuation glyphs. Idiosyncratic and crafted, Trapobana feels playful yet functional, with good readability for text.

I made this font open-source, which means anyone can obtain it for free, modify it, and use it for personal and/or commercial work.

Type Construction

Starting from paper, I let my own hand-drawn shapes lead me to the general feel of the typeface. I kept some of those features in the ascenders, descenders, and serifs. Later on, the placement of head and foot serifs follows a modular scheme and the stress axis takes a slight inclination.

To display the real personality behind Trapobana, I created a series of expressive typographic executions, inspired by my smudges of ink on paper. I extrapolated the typeface's forms and executed distortions, which plays on Trapobana's vibe and feels personal to my style.