Based in Buenos Aires, Antipixel is the graphic design studio owned and operated by Julia Martínez Diana. With a strong focus on branding, web design, and handwritten fonts, Julia’s career has met with a great deal of success working with major corporations that include Knorr, Maybelline New York, Nestlé, Spirit Airlines, Urborne Publishing, and Teen Choice Awards, just to name a very select few.
Ever since her teenage years, Julia possessed and nurtured a great curiosity for typography and design. This interest only continued to grow as time passed, prompting her to attend the University of Buenos Aires to study graphic design. The profession ultimately proved to be the ideal choice for Julia because every project offers a balance of complexity and enjoyment. “Designing a font from scratch is a long process, so patience is a must,” she observed. “But it’s satisfying to finally see their ‘personalities’ coming to life in each character and each alphabet.”
One of Julia’s most recent releases is Escalope, an informal hand-drawn type design with a charismatic and vivacious persona. Organically varied textures add a real depth to this font, an element that Julia worked diligently to achieve. “Escalope had a really complex process of creation, since the texture was part of an experimental exercise at the beginning of it all,” she told us. “Escalope started from a task I named ‘flash fonts,’ a creative work process intended to design fonts in a fast and more intuitive way. It took me a lot of time to create my previous typefaces, which was necessary to get the final result, but this time I wanted to make it different.”
With Escalope, she first began drawing the characters by hand, using the same tool to maintain absolute uniformity. Julia scanned her drawings, using font software to vectorize everything from scratch. After the alphabet was created, the glyphs were arranged in different sheets, printed, and scanned again to gain their authentic photocopied textures because for Julia, there is no substitute for the real thing.
“I like to play with how much I can deteriorate my fonts and still get a professional look,” she expressed. “I enjoy making real textures, scanning and vectorizing them to create unique results. Every project sets its own rules. I don’t like having everything solved from the beginning; it’s like a snowball that starts from a tiny texture, a glyph structure, a font style, or anything else that inspires me and opens the doors to a new project.”
Escalope offers four letter sets and four equally-weighted icon sets with progressive texturing in each for a total of eight variations. Escalope is positively packed with OpenType features and far more complex stylistic sets than Julia had ever attempted. “I wanted to create three Stylistic Sets that responded to the alphabet in upper and lowercase, and numbers too,” she told us. “Each of these had to share similar characteristics among the set they belonged to, but I wanted the final result to be ‘random.'” In the end, through a great deal of research and a lot of trial and error, she succeeded in her task.
Escalope’s complexity is what led Julia to create a useful PDF to accompany her design. “The most common graphic design softwares don’t work all in the same way,” she explained, which caused a growing concern over the font’s potential usage. “What would happen if I promise a result that users don’t know how to access?” she wondered. The resulting PDF offered a simple solution and unique method to explain how to use Escalope in the way it was intended.
Escalope offers more than 1400 glyphs, providing multiple contextual and stylistic alternates. Multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Afrikaans, Pinyin, Venda, and Igbo Onwu for incredible accessibility.
Right now through March 17, 2017 Escalope is on sale for 75% off of its regular price so it’s a perfect time to get this one!
Julia currently offers 11 products through YouWorkForThem and if you love hand-drawn type designs brimming with personality, you’re going to want to check out the rest of Antipixel’s portfolio.
Julia recently began work on a brand new type design in mid-February. “I usually devote all my time to one project at a time due to my work process, which sometimes is a bit slow,” she explained. “I believe it is the most effective way to work for me because it gives me enough time to understand, conceptualize and create each typeface.” While the project is yet unnamed, it is something she has never done before, presenting a new and exciting challenge for Julia.
Whatever comes next, we know it’ll be amazing and we’re looking forward to seeing what she creates!