Premiere Cut
Premiere Cut is the first typeface I ever designed. A steep learning curve, but completely worth it. You know how it goes, first baby and everything. I drew inspiration from R. Middleton’s Stencil and S. Mensah’s Atelier Neue. Download it today, use it to make awesome stuff and let the world see it. Premiere Cut comprises upper and lower case glyphs, numbers and symbols.
I wanted to set my portfolio aside from the multitude of others on the worldwide web. I specifically wanted to make it memorable. It struck me that the souvenirs from my travels have kept those trips at the forefront of my mind.
Whenever I grab my keys, the novelty ring takes me back to summer ‘19 in Rome. Whenever I put on my Egyptian pendant, I recall galloping across the desert towards the Giza pyramids.
That’s what I needed to give my visitors. A souvenir to remember my work by. Something they could take away with them. I also saw this as an opportunity to add to my design skill set. After a couple of days' brainstorming, it finally hit me. I had never designed a typeface.
People use them everyday as you and I are doing right now. Without type, the internet as we know it wouldn’t exist. Before we go any further though, feel free to call it a font if that’s what you’re used to. This is a judgement free zone.
I only knew one person who had ventured into the world of type design, Samuel Mensah. Naturally, the first thing I did was head over to his portfolio to see what a good execution looked like. Next, I needed to figure out the jump from pretty shapes on Illustrator to an actual usable, downloadable and shareable typeface. This is where YouTube came in handy again. I watched over 3 hours of tutorials (seriously, massive shout out to the tube for the endless gems over the years). A few videos later, I discovered Fontself. It made perfect sense as a cost effective and compatible add on to Adobe Illustrator.
The design process itself was relatively straight forward. The premise; use the pen tool to make pixel perfect shapes, convert them into letters and voila. However, as previous projects had taught me, straight forward didn’t always equal fast. Continuous refinement formed a sizeable chunk of the hard work on this project. Take the ‘S’ for example, it took four different versions before arriving at the final one. Furthermore, right before I published the typeface, I decided to go with serif over sans-serif for the upper case ‘S’. As harmony plays a key role in type design, getting the dashes, slices and partitions to work together was of the utmost importance. However, the surgical scalpel truly got to shine during kerning and spacing. The special characters and numbers were relatively simple once the upper and lower case alphabets were defined.
Once I was happy with the outcome, I headed over to Unsplash for the supporting visual. I settled on this rose photo from Joshua Harris. The contrasting red rose against the dark green surroundings created a perfect backdrop for a white version of Premiere Cut.
You can download Premiere Cut today from Gianni & Gianni here and use it across all your projects, personal or commercial. A digital souvenir, from me to you. Enjoy.