Charging Slab
Project Title: Charging Slab
Components: Bespoke Typeface, Printed Case Study
Software Used: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, FontSelf
Typefaces Used: Charging Slab (bespoke), Futura
Charging Slab is a slab-serif display typeface that I designed for WIRED Magazine to use for their online headlines. It’s designed to replace their current typeface, WIRED Display, which has an inconsistent and needlessly confusing mixture of angular and curved forms that distracts from the content of the headline.
Charging Slab intends to capture the same solid, industrial feeling that the current face does, but in a more subtle and elegant way. It has a consistently bold weight designed to draw the attention of readers, and its slab-serif nature lets it preserve the blocky look of the original face while not going to the point of being tacky.
Initially, I considered a sans-serif typeface, but decided it looked too plain to accomplish its aim of standing out and commanding focus.
Once I had chosen the slab serif version, I also struggled with deciding how and where to implement the slanted serif at the top left, which was a distinctive feature of the typeface that I was consistently told to expand the use of to more characters.
The design aspect I struggled with most was the weight of the type; my initial passes felt too heavy. There were also certain characters, such as the majuscule W, that commanded too much attention compared to the others. I spent the bulk of the iteration process getting to a weight I was happy with.
This spread shows the typeface as it would appear on WIRED’s actual home page. If I were to do this case study again, I would have dedicated a full spread to each image, rather than just one page, to show the type at a larger size.
