Gerti Regular: an art nouveau typeface that holds its place as an elegant and graceful face in a crowd of typefaces. With smooth curved lines and rounded details, it flows through space melodically. Not to be confused with too much fragility, the bottom weight of its forms takes on a bold and heavy confidence which contrasts the thin strokes and top-weighted stems. Gerti is a face reminiscent of her ancestors like Böcklin, and is easily associated with the painterly organic lines and ornamentation of art nouveau works. 

The inspiration for this typeface came from Art Nouveau. Much of my research focused on Alphonse Mucha, as he blended typography and image so smoothly and had a vast number of exemplary works. What really struck me as themes of Art nouveau was using a woman to sell desirability of a product, so I knew I wanted to include a woman to sell my typeface. Also, the movement arose from a seeking of bringing an elegance, organic decoration to the otherwise stiff and rigid designs of the past, and it favoured illustration and hand-made images using lithography to create intricate work and reject machine-like forms. Nature and lines were key to the movement, along with pastel colours, the use of patterns, and an emphasis on movement and dynamism. Keeping this in mind, I used this knowledge to inform the creation of my typeface, type specimen, poster, and examples of contexts. 

Beginning with sketches, the refinement of this typeface was made over a 12-week period, consulting with my professor each week to discover details to alter to unify and strengthen the typeface. Everything from stroke-width, spacing, kerning, majuscule-minuscule relation and letterform proportions were carefully considered with much attention. Using Glyphs, a new software, I was able to transform my hand-drawn sketches into a digital, usable typeface. 

The poster series on Bach elegantly represents the varying themes of Bach’s compositions and cohere to the natural world to evoke emotion.

Gerti Regular; the elegant Bocklin, the visualization of the senses, and the art nouveau-esque typeface you never knew you needed as a display face.