EAGLESON

Typeface

Team

Xenia Capcan
Vivian Cho
Christine Ngo

Tools

Glyphs 3
Pen and Paper
Illustrator

Timeline

10 Weeks
‍

Instructor

Karen Cheng

Overview

Eagleson is inspired by a hand-painted sign outside of Eagleson Hall at the University of Washington. This collegiate gothic building began construction in 1922 and gained landmark status in 2019. The building was named after a former University of Washington student and “yell king” Jimmy Eagleson. The structure's ornate flairs and somewhat bizarre features have helped composed the character of our typeface.

work distribution

As the typemaster of this project, I was in charge of compiling all of the characters, spacing and kerning type pairs and polishing all the characters. Although I touched all of the characters in this set, specific characters I worked on included B, D, H, P, R, b, d, l, o, p, q, v, x, and y, along with some numbers, punctuation, ligatures, and additional extra characters for language localization.

INSPIRATION

We were assigned a hand-painted sign outside Eagleson Hall at the University of Washington, and was tasked with creating a typeface based off of that sign. We were instantly drawn to the very unique serifs, and wanted to highlight that within our final letterforms.

SERIFS

The curve of the serifs is taken directly from how the brush strokes work when a sign painter writes letters on a sign. We also kept the diagonal ends as a call back to the building's namesake, Jimmy Eagleson, who was a cheerleader. We hoped that would add a more peppy flair.

Special characters

As it was my first time creating a typeface, I wanted to try my hand at creating extra characters. Adding ligatures and characters that allowed me to experiment with combining glyphs together helped me to understand the inner workings of a letterform better.

LOWERCASE

As the inspiration sign only had two lowercase letters, we quickly realized that most of it was up to us. We kept the x-height pretty low to give us more of a round size, which made it feel bouncier than most serifs. We also added the large serifs in, but adjusted them so they wouldn't be too clunky.