FontDiscovery 🖼️ 25: Communicate Crafty and Artisanal with Knewave

I'm Hua, a designer and bootstrapping founder building Typogram, a brand design tool. As part of running Typogram, I create this digestible weekly guide with fonts, colors, and design ideas to help founders, creators, and makers step up their game in marketing and get creative!

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Hi There 👋

Welcome to another issue of FontDiscovery! This weekend I went to the beach. It was really nice! I would love to hear what you did this weekend over email or twitter!

Let’s get dig into this week’s issue.

In this issue

• Theme: Crafty
• Fonts: Knewave, a brushy crafty companion for simpler
• Design idea: Primitive Figuration
• Color Inspiration: Arts and Crafts movement

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{img: sample of Knewave}

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Font of the Week

Knewave on the Streets

Do streets and urban environments inspire you? If so, Knewave is an excellent place to start.  Knewave is a brush letter font. brush lettering is deeply rooted in sign painting, which is the craft of hand painting signs on buildings or billboards to advertise products. This was one of the primary ways businesses market themselves before the advent of computer software.

Due to the rapid technological change, though it may seem the sign painting community had disappeared, it is still very much alive. Since technology made mass production much more effortless, sign painting now focuses on personality and uniqueness. Business owners wanted one-of-a-kind statements, and that’s what sign painting offered: unique creative campaigns that make a single business stand out.

Knewave is an excellent font that embodies the sign painting spirits. It is graphic and communicates artisanal, crafty liveliness. We could see this on an album cover, wall art inside cafes, or streetwear brands.

Font Details

• Two styles, regular and outline
• Fat brush strokes
• Swelled brush tips

{img: two versions of Knewave}

{img: fat brush strokes and swelled brush tip of Knewave}

Specific Usage Tips

How to use it for logos?

Knewave is expressive and communicates a crafty and artisanal attitude because of the swelled brush strokes. These traits may work for a specific niche like music, apparel, food, or creative brands. It is pretty legible as a logo font, but you should still pay attention when used on a smaller scale.

How to use it for marketing and branding?

A brushy font like this can look great in large size and against a photo. In addition, both styles can be great for swag and decals. However, since it is a very decorative handwriting font, we shouldn’t use it for body or longer description text. Instead, you can pair it with another more neutral font for body-size copy, like Nunito.

{img: use case for Knewave, as you can see, when it’s in long sentences, it becomes hard to read.}

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Design Idea of the Week

Primitive Figuration

Primitive Figuration is the simplification of the body and facial features. It reduces realistic human figures into abstract shapes. This tactic stemmed from African art and became vital to modern logos and illustrations. Saul Bass, known for his movie posters, used this technique for the poster and opening of Anatomy of a Murder.

{img: Saul Bass’s movie poster uses the Primitive Figuration technique. source: Wikimedia Commons}

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Color Inspirations of the Week

Are you ever tired of technology and think about simpler times? That’s what a group of artists did in Britain around the 1880s when they formed the Arts and Crafts movement. These artists were concerned about the effects of industrialization on traditional craft and turned to new ways of living and working, where they actively promoted the role of craftsmanship.

{img: one of the central figures of the Art and Craft movement is William Morris, who is well known for his wallpaper patterns; source: Wikipedia}

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Creative Prompt

Can you create a visual for Twitter or Instagram using Knewave, primitive figuration technique, or the color palette we featured today?

Thank you

…for reading and hanging out here this week! Knewave is available here.

{img: infographic of Knewave}

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If you enjoy this series, you can subscribe here:

Have more questions about design and fonts? 
Please email me [email protected] or find me on Twitter at @HuaTweets.
You can also read the past issues on Typogram's blog.