Commissioned by Tumblr and in close collaboration with Creative Director, Doug Richard.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Tumblr’s in-house Creative team, we developed a custom typeface, “Favorit-Tumblr”, and updated their iconic logo.
For the logo, the “t” and “r” characters were recut to stylistically align with defining attributes of the custom typeface. Other letters received more subtle updates; cleaning up overly nuanced attributes, and bringing a more architectural feel to the mark.
Optimizations such as the elimination of curved intersections, helped to optimize the logo for small screens without losing its essence. And most notably, we strategically removed the logo’s period, allowing the logo and typeface to seamlessly integrate across all naming conventions.
Additionally, we partnered with Tumblr to customize our typeface, Favorit, to their specific needs. Together, we cut new characters, interpolated new weights, introduced rounded punctuation, and scaled its overall appearance to fit their needs.
Tumblr’s internal team built a standalone iOS tool, helping to test through iterations and optimization rounds of the font.
The Favorit Tumblr family offers screen optimised weights in both the Standard and Lining versions with corresponding italics.
New logo and custom typeface share the same proportions and x-height.
Ensuring flawless legibility across all screen sizes, UI-specific weights with corresponding italics were developed.
Favorit-Tumblr’s Lining style contextually merges characters with an integrated underline to create new shapes. By default it’s ideal for simple text highlighting, while with the “Rock’n’Roll” feature enabled it merges all initial and final word characters with the underline in a more exaggerated way.
The Favorit-Tumblr styles feature distinct glyph amendments like: custom cut characters, two sets of circled numbers optimised for in-app use, in-line logos, expressive alternative quotation marks and redesigned ligatures.
Tumblr began quietly implementing first cuts of the font in June of 2017, while we continued to evolve the shapes over the following year, allowing it to mature alongside their visual language.
In June of 2018, Tumblr rolled out the new logo, soon to be followed by the full scale implementation of Favorit-Tumblr across all their web and app products.