With more than 20 years of experience in his field, Tana Kosiyabong is a prolific graphic designer, typographer, and art director in Vancouver, Canada. Over the course of his career so far, Tana has worked in just about every visual outlet from traditional print, digital type, creative advertising, and environmental design, for international accounts that include Disney, Nivea, Volkswagen, and Toyota.
Tana’s own company, Social Brands, focuses on “building businesses from the ground up” through the use of persuasive graphic design, intelligent web design, smart packaging design, confident art direction, and effective social media strategies and campaigns. Tana is not only a creative thinker; he is an excellent strategist with a natural aptitude for the graphic design and advertising industry.
These days, Tana has found himself focusing a bit more on type design, desiring to create a brand of his own. In partnership with Sir Angus of Gastown, a debonair-yet-mischievous blue brindle French Bulldog, Tana launched R9 Type+Design in 2016. Tana serves as Creative Director and Type Designer, while Sir Angus thoroughly enjoys a comfortable position as the cutest Recreational Director you’ll ever see. “Angus is highly motivated, especially when food is involved,” Tana said. “His talents include speed eating, roll-over trick, and taking a nap.”
When they’re not working hard together in the office, Tana enjoys taking Sir Angus on walks through Vancouver and sharing their adventures with the world through Sir Angus’ tumblr.
R9 Type+Design’s first series of releases is the Alio family, whose basic structure found its influence in flowing cursive letterforms and smooth sans serifs, pairing their most notable characteristics together to create a uniquely-styled type design built with versatility in mind.
Its inception was not an instantaneous strike of creative lightning, however; Tana diligently worked his way through several buckets of fried chicken that were blissfully drowned in a sweet Thai chili sauce, downing freshly-brewed coffee as he explored countless ideas before the visual bones of Alio finally emerged. During the course of the months that followed, and in spite of long hours spent on meticulous kerning and minute details, Tana fell in love with the process of type design.
Alio Text, as Tana and Sir Angus explained, is the workhorse member of the Alio family, designed to function equally well in displays and body text. A taller x-height, wider letter spacing, and more pronounced accents make Alio Text stand apart from its siblings, yet it perfectly complements the rest of the family to achieve design cohesion.
Alio Text is a pleasant, approachable type design that’s cleanly legible, even in small point. It’s amenable to a wide array of projects, including signage, displays, advertising, headlines, editorials, product packaging, branding, website content, and mobile applications.
Alio Text is available in four weights that include Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold, with corresponding italics for each. It offers case sensitive forms, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, numerators, denominators, and stylistic alternates. With more than 500 glyphs, Alio Text provides multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Pinyin, and Basic Greek for exceptional global accessibility.
Right now, Alio Text is on sale for 30% off of its regular price through May 31, 2017 so it’s an excellent time to add this one to your font stash!
R9 Type+Design is brand new to YouWorkForThem and we’re really looking forward to their future releases. Visit their portfolio and bookmark it so you can keep an eye on Sir Angus and Tana’s upcoming work!
