Carvalho Bernau

BBB Flitwick

BBB Flitwick is the first in a series of bespoke display typefaces for UK Esquire’s Big Black Book. The series is commissioned by their creative director David McKendrick after he used our Jean-Luc typeface for the inaugural issue of the format.

Flitwick is inspired by industrial and engineering letters, and it carries notes from both British vernacular poster types and Morris Fuller Benton’s American gothics. Its flattened sides and matter-of-fact shapes give it a tough and sturdy look that plays well against the sumptuous photography of Big Black Book. When we showed it to David he was quite in love with it but kept asking us to “make it weirder”. We came up with very engineering-looking solution that matches Flitwick’s overall feel: To better balance short lines of justified text, Flitwick features horizontally extensible letters in six different widths – from just a bit wider to completely ludicrous. The extended letters nicely disturb the rhythm and create a look that is playfully brutal.