The design process: How we create TypePosters designs

Every TypePosters design starts as a question: what if a single letter could carry this much personality? The answer takes weeks of work, dozens of iterations, and a process that balances creative instinct with technical precision. Here is how a design goes from concept to your wall.

Research & inspiration

Each design begins with research into a specific typographic tradition, visual style, or cultural reference. Deco started with a deep dive into 1920s poster art and architectural lettering. Industry came from photographing factory signage across Manchester and Sheffield. Miami was born from a folder of neon signs and Art Deco hotels.

This research phase is about immersion — understanding not just what a style looks like, but why it looks that way. What were the constraints that shaped it? What materials was it designed for? What mood was it trying to create? The answers to these questions become the design brief.

Sketching & concept development

With the research in hand, the first sketches happen on paper. Pencil and graph paper, usually. The goal at this stage is to find the essential character of the style and translate it into a set of rules that can apply consistently across 36 characters (A-Z plus 0-9).

This is the hardest part of the process. A typeface that looks beautiful as a word or sentence may not work as a single isolated character. When you remove the context of surrounding letters, each character has to stand entirely on its own. It has to be recognisable, balanced, and visually interesting in isolation.

We typically sketch 10-15 concept directions before narrowing down to two or three that go to the screen.

Digital development

The chosen concepts move into vector illustration software, where the real precision work begins. Each character is drawn from scratch — we do not modify existing typefaces. Every curve, every angle, every stroke width is a deliberate decision.

A typical design goes through 30-50 revisions at this stage. We test each character at every size from A4 to A0, checking that details read clearly at small sizes and that the design does not feel empty at large sizes. A line that looks elegant at A3 might look thin and weak at A0. A texture that adds depth at A1 might become muddy at A4.

We also test colour at this stage. Each design has a primary colour palette, but we need to ensure the design works across different colour variants and against both light and dark backgrounds.

The 36-character challenge

Most typeface designers work with the full alphabet in mind from the start, but our challenge is different. Each character needs to work as a standalone artwork — a poster in its own right, not a building block for words.

Some characters are naturally photogenic. The letter A has strong diagonals and a clear structure. M has architectural symmetry. S has beautiful curves. Others are harder: I is a single vertical stroke. O is a circle. The number 1 is essentially a line.

Making the challenging characters as visually compelling as the easy ones is where most of the iteration happens. Sometimes a design that works beautifully for 30 characters needs a fundamental rethink to accommodate the remaining six. We have scrapped near-finished designs because they could not solve the O problem.

Print testing

Before a design is released, we print every character at every size. That is 36 characters across 5 sizes — 180 test prints per design. We inspect each one for colour accuracy, detail rendering, and visual impact.

The prints are checked on our production paper (180gsm bright white matte) under different lighting conditions: daylight, warm artificial light, and cool LED light. A design that looks perfect in daylight but washes out under warm bulbs needs adjustment. The colours in the final design are calibrated for real-world viewing conditions, not just screen accuracy.

Quality control & release

Once the print tests pass, the design files are prepared for production. Each character is saved as a high-resolution file optimised for giclée printing at each size. The files include precise colour profiles (ICC) that ensure consistency between our test prints and the production prints our customers receive.

The final step is photographing the design for the website. We shoot the prints in real room settings to show how they look on a wall, alongside mock-ups that show every character variant. By the time a design appears on our website, it has been through weeks of development and hundreds of test prints.