Mestiza
How do you get a type-phobic illustrator to love typography? Mestiza is another personal project. The goal here was to take an existing type specimen page and rebrand it in a way that is visually distinct from the original. A project I partook in as a way to learn more about typography and explore how to integrate it more intentionally in my work. I was drawn to the Mestiza font because of the strange, graphical tittle of the “i” character. Since I was rebranding an already existing brand, I focused on approaching the design concept from a new angle, but still keeping the functionality of the type, meaning keeping in mind what the type was originally made for. In this case, Mestiza was made to be a display ideal for branding. The font is stylized to be a mix of contemporary aesthetics with a handmade touch.
Something that screams Mexico...
To choose the new angle, I decided to approach the brand based on what caught my attention about the font in the first place — that it was created in a studio founded and based in Mexico. I was excited to hear about this design agency, being Mexican-American myself. So, for the design, I experimented with emphasizing the cultural origin of the font & design agency, aiming to create a new brand where the Mexican cultural influence is easily recognizable. Of the three designs I drafted (see below), I chose the third option as it best accomplished the goal of being most visually tied to Mexico. I also created packing mockups to best showcase what the font is best intended to portray to potential buyers, since the original type specimen page was meant to market these fonts to designers. The final single page was then reworked into a Figma prototype to better simulate a real type specimen page.
Explorations
Throughout this process, I gained a more thorough understanding of how to use type, refine my personal sense of art direction, and improve my ability to build Figma prototypes. For someone who avoided using typography for the longest time to create a type-focused project that ended up being my most complimented design, I’d consider this project a success.
