Desperados

The brief

Images credit: https://www.instagram.com/lffpofficielle/

Since its creation, Desperados beer has exploited a wide range of typography. Condensed sans serifs can also be replaced by lettering with paper-cut effects or a script with vernacular pretensions.

This great disparity may suit the launch of a new bottle with an original aroma, but in the medium and long term it doesn't allow us to present a coherent collection: light, sunny drinks evoking the exoticism of Latin America.

The solution

Desperados' communications agency opted for a single typography as the most relevant and obvious solution: adapted to the various writing systems of extended Latin, and evoking both the modernity of the drink, and the tradition of a Latin beer born in the street, consumed in the street.

Like its recognizable logo, the condensed letters, criss-crossed in the wooden lettering of early 20th-century posters, perfectly convey this duality, which simply needs to be taken a step further by exploiting graphic wear, flaws and imperfections.

The simplest solution would be to apply digital textures to the characters. However, for a predictable and unconvincing result, this simple process generates a lot of tedious work that doesn't easily allow for last-minute modifications, whether for printed or digital media.

In the summer of 2024, Blaze Type was approached by the communications agency to develop this custom typeface. But, rather than develop a typeface from scratch, the brand preferred to start from an existing, royalty-free typeface already incorporating the graphic codes of these wooden typefaces.

Anton (Vernon Adams, 2020), for example, will feature intact typography, while Blaze Type will feature Anton Desperados, its damaged counterpart.

The first step is not immediately to age the typeface, but to give it that typical coloring of old typesetting: within the same case, some glyphs of the same typeface sometimes come from a different foundry, generating inconsistent kerning and width.

The typographic gray is thus disrupted, narrowing and reducing the kerning of certain glyphs. The text takes on a dancing appearance, true to these defects, bringing all the warmth of vintage posters.

Léon Hugues, lead designer on this project, reports: 

"I'm used to designing very clean vector type, with precise, neat curves. But here, we found ourselves in a totally opposite approach: we had to break the letters, tear them, pierce them, give them matter, density - as if they'd been printed on an old press, then ripped off and glued back on by hand."

"The idea, then, was to apply textures to them. The challenge was that the more texture we added, the more we risked compromising the legibility of the letters.
Initially, we experimented with different filters via Photoshop, to see how the letters could deteriorate and fragment, while retaining a lively, grainy effect. Once we'd found the right level of texture, we had to go back to each letter, correcting, retouching and adjusting the textures. Random effects didn't always produce the desired result - so we sometimes had to add, sometimes remove elements, always playing with the delicate boundary between expressiveness and legibility.
The challenge was to create a lively, expressive, textured character, while maintaining a certain degree of control. We wanted a rendering that didn't look too digital, too artificial."

There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing within the foundry, as well as with the advertiser's communications agency: each glyph had to be inspected to ensure that it did not reproduce the same effects, in the same places, and above all did not harm the legibility of the text. 

To achieve this, two variants were developed in parallel: a lightly textured version, and a much rougher, almost saturated version. A real balancing act, between visual expressiveness and typographic rigor.

It should be noted that the diacritical characters are not assembled automatically, but, on the contrary, show wear variations, thus increasing the sincerity of the approach.

Far from being a simple technical exercise, this simple request turns out to be a tour de force in which the type designer also becomes a graphic artist, working the design in a communicative and expressive way. A fine demonstration of the foundry's expertise. As Blaze Type likes to remind us: our job is to provide tools that meet the needs of precise or multiple uses.