Oikos Custom Typeface

Client: Oikos
Agency: Danone North America Brand Design and Beardwood & Co
Role: Typeface Design and Development
Support: Carly Salzman, Brethren Design CO.

A custom typeface for an industry leader.

The Opportunity: Oikos (Danone Brand Design Studio in collaboration with Beardwood & CO.) was going to market with a new package design for their thick, fruity, forkable yogurt. The design team couldn’t seem to find a typeface that was legible, readable, playful and confident all while considering the stylistic synergy of their new bold, angular logotype.

The Solution: Focused on legibility and readability, we created a custom typeface that is playful as it is confident. With use-cases across packaging, advertising and marketing collateral, this typeface needed to be incredible versatile as spanned the gamut from headline to body copy, and everything in between.

All design and layout by Beardwood & CO and Danone North America Brand Design studio.

The typeface needed to be flexible — Oikos needed a typeface that supports long-form body copy as well as large-scale headlines and advertising.

Process:

Starting with the classic proportions of byzantine letterforms, we grouped the letters based on classic proportion letter width (BELFPRS, MW, IJKN, AVDPE, etc.). Once we had a general letter width to work with, we constructed a flexible grid system that allowed for varying widths, baseline and cap-heights. This allowed us to create a custom typeface for Oikos’ packaging that felt structured and intentional but also bouncy and playful. We worked to achieve “hand written” but simultaneously refined.

After a few rounds of character iteration, kerning and weight versioning (ensuring that the bold was bold enough and the regular was light enough) we ran a final series of tests to ensure that the varying baseline and cap heights were not too playful or too serious, and that the deviations in letterform weight were enough to feel natural, but not so much that it felt unconsidered.