Holly
Get cozy and grab a cup of hot cocoa! Holly is a playfully hand-drawn Christmas typeface perfect for sleigh rides, caroling, and lifting people’s spirits this festive season.
- Typography -
Collaboration + Creation
Creative direction / Illustration / typography
The project
With the festive season approaching, we wanted to experiment with creating a fun, elegant, and organic typeface that was a little different from the classic script typefaces traditionally used at this time of the year.
We set out to create a complete original alphabet along with collateral concepts for its launch.
The strategy
The design of ‘Holly’ draws inspiration from Bodoni and Didot, having strong contrast in stroke weight whilst combining it with organic hand-drawn characteristics. This combination has seen the emergence of a hybrid typeface that in some ways is a structured serif yet has many features that are more common in hand lettering and display fonts. The contrast has been pulled back slightly, thickening the hairline stroke to ensure it is more legible.
The typeface is also characterised by its variations of serifs where letters, depending on their structure, are finished with a curved serif that is squared-off or rounded bell-like serifs that add a fun personality to the typeface. We specifically created Holly to have no straight edges and to always have an element of movement in each character to keep consistent throughout and to make sure each character was individually beautiful. The addition of the bell-like serifs & curves began to give it fun & festive personality which reminded us of Christmas.
Although Holly is a very heavy typeface in terms of the contrast within the characters it comes across as light and fun due to the little imperfections and rounded curves and edges that you don’t see in Didot and Bodoni. This organic feel brings life to Holly and allows it to be used on occasions of celebrations whether it be baby showers, birthdays or the creatives’ favourite, Christmas. These festive seasons bring a lot of joy to people lives and that is what this typeface is all about no matter what time of year.