Reading Illegible Manhole Covers
From Manhole Cover to a Typeface
Hey there,
Instead of looking ahead, something appears beneath your feet. Every few meters, with a unique shape and pattern in every city or village. It’s the manhole cover. In this second newsletter, we explore the process of turning these manhole covers into a typeface that balances readability with personality.
This is the second publication in our series on ordinary products — a graphic exploration where we, Esmée and Thijmen, uncover patterns as part of our project, Step+Set.
During a sunny walk, we captured every manhole cover we came across in Beneden Leeuwen (a village full of manhole covers) turning our collection into an aesthetic series. Among them, a few covers stood out, one caught our attention with its uniquely distinct shape compared to the rest.
It was TBS – a round manhole cover with holes and smoothly rounded edges. As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we often start by drawing a grid based on an image. The same approach we applied to this font.
The grid turned out to be quite challenging. Without clear vertical or horizontal centerlines, it’s harder to create readable characters. Above that, the circular shape didn’t show a clear ascender height or descender length at first.
Balancing between readability and personality of the characters we had to come up with some typographic rules:
The font only contains lowercase letters.
Ascenders and descenders are shown by the blocks surrounding the manhole cover.
If a horizontal line is required it can be built up by filling the centre block plus smaller blocks on the left and right side.
Although the font remains experimental and leans more towards a distinct personality than readability, we are very happy to add it to our font catalogue.
Just like the other grids, you can modify and download it on our website → stepplusset.nl
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