Kate Poe
TYPEFACES
Da Spira
2024
Da Spira s a balanced roman typeface revived from the first books printed in Venice, Italy in 1470 by German printing brothers Giovanni and Vindelino de Spira. I developed the typeface from scans of the 500-year old book taken at the Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy in 2022.
Da Spira is legible at small sizes, making it ideal for longform text and multi-size copy. At larger point sizes, Da Spira holds a unique ghostly charm. The typeface features a long-tailed “Q”, characteristically Venetian thin crossbar on “e”, extra long inside serifs on “H”, and old style numbers.
Fridge & Freezer
2024
As part of my 2024 Senior Design thesis, I developed two playful display typefaces using refrigerator poetry magnets.
Both typefaces are caps-only and work best at a large point size when the interior words are legible.
Freezer
Freezer is an iteration of Fridge, but with a frosty border around each character that is remniscent of freezer-burnt frozen goods. Freezer comes in two styles: Empty, with a transparent blocks inside the text, and Filled, which has a white background. Freezer is more inconsistent than Fridge, with varying widths of magnet components. The interior text is more blurry, though the words are more varied.
Fridge
Fridge is the cleaner, more finalized version of Freezer. It was designed using vectors with text and text knock-outs in Illustrator. Fridge comes in two styles: Filled, for when you’ve just bought groceries, and Empty, for when its time to run to Trader Joe’s. Filled features knockouts while Empty has borders. Fridge is much more crisp than Freezer, with thinner edges and more legible interior text. Fridge also comes with basic punctuation and numbers.
San Marco
2022
Uppercase
San Marco is a caps-only digital typeface derived specifically from a series of 13th century biblical passages along the upper atrium ceiling of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Italy. Because it is designed from centuries old mosaics, I conducted research on typical gothic lettering to compensate for obscure letterforms, missing characters, and the frequent use of Latin ligatures.