helloGirl is a sharp hairline serif designed over the course of 6 weeks. A monoweight typeface, it features elongated serifs and thick brackets that add contrast and character. The Henry Ford Museum, a partner in this type design endeavor, opened the doors to its expansive archive, a collection of historical artifacts painting a picture of everyday life, where the view of massive switchboards sparked this typeface.
Both the Oblique and Regular fonts owe their grid and structures to the geometry of a switchboard. The hairline strokes are elegant and sophisticated. The name is a tribute to the fantastic ladies that manned the swtichboards during World War I and who were aptly nicknamed “Hello Girls.”
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The hellogirl Oblique specimen is part of Gadzook: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters, along with 12 other typefaces designed during this collaboration. This type specimen book is not only part of The Henry Ford’s collection, but also a winner of the 2023 Communication Arts Typography Annual.
I revisited this project over a year later, now ready to polish each glyph and fix any wonkyness, when I realized that the Oblique really needed a roman partner. So, I reimagined each glyph from hellogirl Oblique in the upright position, and as I worked on this I also began to see the potential for beautiful, script-like ligatures.
(more images coming soon)