TDC 64

When we were asked in 2018 to design an identity for the Type Director’s Club (TDC) prestigious annual competition, we initially proposed to not use any typefaces at all in the Club’s communications—instead handwriting everything. We were told to go back to the drawing board, and what we proposed instead was to resurrect a dozen abandoned typefaces that we had designed over the years for various clients. We wanted to break these apart and reassemble them as a single typographic voice in a face we called Cast of Characters. It was an exciting exercise for us. Each of the original typefaces had been crafted in the context of a certain function, aligned to a specific client project, and much care had been given to the relationship between the letterforms within each face. To exorcise the context for each face and juxtapose them with random association gave each typeface an unexpected new life. For the TDC we wanted the visual identity system to begin with the fundamental color palette of type design (black and white) and then introduced a bright neon green (Pantone 903) that would allow us to slice up layouts, frame compositions, and add visual emphasis and hierarchy on both digital and physical applications. Cast of Characters is paired with Chivo for text.