Agatized Informal

Agatized Informal is a rough-edged stencil typeface with chunky letterforms and tight spacing. Designed primarily for display use, it’s ideal for posters, logos, advertising, book cover designs or small chunks of text such as pull-out quotes.

The design is something of an enigma, a curious mish-mash of genres – try splicing Uncle Buck and Deadpool into a horror movie – it’s big, bold and funny but it also has a dark side.

But what really makes this typeface a joy to drive is its boot full of alternative characters and ligatures. There is a saying: Use sparingly. Not on this street! Make your Glyphs palette burn rubber. Set your OpenType to full throttle: crank up your style and get those liga-tyres screeching. Agatized is a souped-up old campervan spinning doughnuts on the beach.

The design started life as a piece of lettering for a book design that didn’t progress past the sketch stage. I liked the rough, dense character shapes, so during some down time I started drawing more characters and the lure of a new typeface pulled me in from there.

Although this is a single-weight typeface it has a younger sibling, Agatized Formal, a neater, more dapper brother, smoother round the chops and smartly dressed – definitely no less fun though.