LNT Tara 

Meet the LNT Tara font family, a typographic contemplation on road marks, tracks and traces, wandering at the edge of legibility.

The first sketches of the typeface originate from an assignment years ago, when I was looking for letterforms that resembled tire tracks. Recently the old sketch underwent a major transformation. It became a play-space for welding together references and building with precast blocks. While remaining abstract and contemporary, LNT Tara makes an homage to the ancient Ogham script. Ogham, a writing system probably originating from the Latin alphabet, was used in Ireland and parts of Britain the early Middle Ages. Most Ogham inscriptions that are known today were preserved on rocks, often used as road markings. Some think that Ogham was invented as a secret writing, others say that it was an intrinsic part of the Celtic belief system, and each character, besides their vocal value, was also connected to a tree sort, and therefore also bore ritualistic power.

LNT Tara is an experimental uniwidth typeface with four styles. Each style reflects a distinct aspect of traces and markings you may encounter on the road: one resembles more to tire tracks and the other to footprints, and yet another one to carvings in a stone. While remaining readable to the eyes trained for the Latin script, all four stlyes evoke a fictional world – both ancient and futuristic – which could be these letters’ natural habitat. The typeface is a challenge to the designer to think in bold and novel ways about typography and create the visual worlds in which the characters of LNT Tara live.