Oculi

About Oculi

What if Roman inscriptional lettering had a lowercase? What if its design was meant for running text?

Oculi is inspired by Roman lettering but continues on a hypothetical journey where its source left off. Most Roman-inspired typefaces either ignore the lowercase completely or are really only meant for larger sizes. Oculi imagines what a lowercase would look like if such a thing were designed to match the capital letters and work at smaller sizes.

The basis for such an imagined lowercase don’t pull from anything too specific; the contrast is more like an oldstyle typeface than like a Didot or Bodoni—in keeping with that of the capital letters.

As the weight of the letterforms increases, the serifs stay the same size despite the contrast decreasing. This seems to be the most in keeping with the spirit of the carved letterforms—based on looking through many examples of different Roman lettering.

Since there was no real model for the italics, the design here relies on a change of form to distinguish them from the upright letters. Symposium’s italics are based on the Renaissance italics of Arrighi and Griffo (the sort of designs you would commonly find with an oldstyle typeface.) The italics have a very minor slant of only 4º and rely on the difference in design to make their presence known.

The future plans for this typeface include adding more weights and an optical size meant for larger sizes. Language support will likely by the standard JTD character set which is most all of Latin-alphabet-using Europe and Vietnam (along with the other languages covered by that character set.)

OpenType Features

Language Support