Semafont

A five-day workshop on multi-script type. Semafont folds three ways of spelling a letter into one serif capital: the Latin form, its flag-semaphore arms, and its maritime signal flag, read through the NATO phonetic alphabet.

The brief was a multi-script typeface: one family that carries more than one writing system at once. Rather than pair Latin with another spoken language, Semafont pairs it with two systems built for shouting across water, drawn from my own background in aviation as a pilot and a long-standing love of sailing. Every capital carries the two arm positions a signaller would hold for that letter, drawn as a diagonal that cuts through the serif form, and the maritime signal flag that stands for it in the International Code of Signals, in its proper colours. Read the letter, the arms or the flags and you arrive at the same place.

The three systems share a history that made the pairing feel earned rather than clever. Latin capitals arrived through the Etruscans; Chappe’s optical telegraph of 1792 turned the arm positions of a semaphore into a national network before the electric wire; the maritime flags were codified in 1857 and are still flown; and the NATO phonetic alphabet of 1956 gave every letter a word that could survive a bad radio. The specimen sets one of those words per page, ALPHA through ZULU, so the alphabet is learned the way sailors and pilots learn it.

Five days is not long enough to draw a text face, so the decisions were about restraint: capitals only, a Roman serif skeleton that could take the diagonal without breaking, and flags placed where they read at display size. Colour is critical in the maritime code, so the flags are the one place in the alphabet that is not black. The result is an educational face first: a poster or a book page from it teaches you three alphabets while pretending to teach you one.