Here's a quick preview of Coldharbour: the font we've been developing for Home (see below). Essentially, it's a homage to the chaotic, uninhibited, Helvetica-free signage that helps makes Coldharbour Lane like no place on earth. For those who don't know Coldharbour, it's one of the major arteries in Brixton and South London, a place where the character and individuality of the area is unescapable - Oxford Street it certainly isn't... It's also the site of the fabrik development where Home will be unveiled later this summer.
Each character is drawn from a letter on a shopfront somewhere along the mile-long street - in this sense, Coldharbour is a 'meta-font', sourced from the vernacular styles that enliven the whole area. As well as celebrating the independent, non-corporate nature of all the shops (and their graphic identities), the font acts as a typographic treasure hunt - encouraging local people to look harder at the signage that surrounds them, to appreciate its eccentricities, and to try to work out what comes from where.
We're now in the final stages of making it a fully-functioning font. When that's done, we can start using it in all our final designs for Home.
