In 1893, British type designer William Morris wrote, in an essay called The Ideal Book, “To be short, the letters should be designed by an artist, and not an engineer.” Pedanto is a typeface as if it was designed by an engineer.
When creating Pedanto I set out to create a perfect typeface. A typeface that follows such a strict series of rules that it results in oddities and poor visual harmony. I knew I didn't have the skill to create a typeface with the same meticulous human details as the icons like Helvetica, Garamond, or Futura, so Pedanto was my solution, a typeface that doesn’t have a fine-tuned contour or even overshoot on the curved forms. The typeface is designed with one stroke weight, two circle diameters, and three angles (90°, 45°, 22.5°). Descenders and ascenders are exactly the same sizes, and every curve has on of two radii. Each form follows the restrictive rules exactly, with no exceptions made for legibility or visual constancy.
I wanted to see what perfection looked like when applied to type. Creating a weird system that highlights why the human touch is so important. Futura’s sharp terminals and Garamond’s inconsistent serifs are what makes them great, even if they technically don’t align to the baseline or fit into a set of hard rules.
Pedanto is exciting to me because it acts as analogy that considers the esoteric conversations about human mistakes and creativity: Is a flawed creation better than a perfect one? Can a binary computer create work that has the same merit as a human’s creations? And mostly, is perfection valuable?
