Plakato, a stencil love affair
Plakato is a family of display fonts, consisting of various eye-catching styles, each of them very bold. Plakato is an identity toolkit, a heavyweight building block in case you need a strong personality, a small stencil font family to cut out your best ideas and grab all the attention. But just as with many other creations, its outcome is as divers as its multiple origins.
Plakato comes in 16 eye-catching styles. The default stencil style comes in Regular & Italic. They both have 2 variations: one version, named Plakato Stencil, automatically creates borders around the text, putting any text into a graphic stencil in this way. Another version, the extruded three-dimensional version, guarantees even more attention for your message.
Next to this there is also the Inline version, which is an optical play with a lot of lines. Plakato Inline has a supportive background layer, a separate font in case you want to add a background in a different colour.
Then there is Plakato Paper, a manually teared version of Plakato offering a more physical look. This small family of eye-catching display fonts also contains a Neon font, an independent design in Plakato style, which can actually be used for making neon signs due to its construction. Plakato Neon comes with its own Dingbat font for that extra flush-flush. Plakato has also been redrawn on a C64, and with all its accompanying limitations been ported back and turned into a font: Plakato Game. Also this font comes with its own Dingbat font, full of emoji’s and icons for oldskool pleasure.
Last but not least there is Plakato Build, constructed out of blocks. As if that wasn’t enough, there are various dynamic versions in the Plakato Play package, which offer a whole new range of possibilities for typographic expression, with new animation and interaction opportunities.
About Underware
Underware (www.underware.nl) is a rock-hard font foundry with a whole lot of feeling for real type. Stunning retail fonts, exclusive branding, custom type for demanding clients, own freaky design tools, you name it. Sweating & rocking in Den Haag, Helsinki and Amsterdam. Founded by Akiem Helmling, Sami Kortemäki and Bas Jacobs in 1999.
Underware's creations have received many awards - recently their innovative dynamic writing fonts received Gold in German Design Award 2021, Certificate of Excellence at TDC New York 2020 and Winner at TDC Tokyo 2020. More about dynamic writing at www.grammato.com.
Three separate locations don't limit the way they cooperate with each other. This is how underwarers themselves describe the process:
"Our intense cooperation creates surprises by itself. A collaboration offers possibilities which individuals can't benefit from. For example: sometimes all of us reserve a whole day for sketching new type. Early in the morning one of us sends a picture to one of the others, and that person has to create a typeface which fits for this picture within one day. A quick and easy way to push our creative borders, and surprise yourself.
We usually start sketching on paper, sometimes very rough with a pen during a phone talk, other times more precisely with a brush or pencil in a more concentrated moment. Sketching by hand allows you to find new forms, to create a specific, unique style. Once you've found that style, the rest of the characters are digitally created and fine-tuned. During the following design process, eg when additional weights are being created, we occasionally return to sketching on paper to find new solutions for problems we meet in the digital process.
But in the end, it doesn't matter if the computer or a brush or pencil are your tools. The most important tool is your brain."
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