ITC Kumquat

Continuing the exploration of rough-edged, hand-drawn letters that he began with ITC Tapioca and ITC Pious Henry, South Carolina designer Eric Stevens turned to a highly stylized, decorative form in ITC Kumquat, to which he says he was trying to give a “Mesopotamian” feel. The lettering originated in the logo for Stevens’s design firm, Tower of Babel. “I tried to create exaggerated characters,” says Stevens, “such as the uppercase A and L, to contrast with the slimmer characters, e.g., S, B, and G. This may sound kind of hokey, but as I worked on the characers I tried to imagine drawing figures in the sand with a stick.” This led him to use straight lines where we might expect curves, in letters such as the lowercase r and m. “And as with my other two designs for ITC, it seemed that the texture of the face added to what, in my mind at least, was an antiquated feel.“