Letterforms as signals. Glyphs aloft. Words across the open air.
A short reflection on signals, on flags, and on the quiet work that goes into making a single character that travels.
The mariner who lifts a flag does not believe the flag is the message. The flag is a stand-in, an agreed shape, a carrier of meaning between people who cannot speak across the distance that separates them. So it is with letters. Each one is a small flag, small enough to fit a fingertip, and yet capable of carrying an entire thought from one mind to another mind that may never meet it.
This is the modest and astonishing fact that typefaces are built upon. A reader, glancing at a page, recognises shapes that someone, somewhere, drew with intention. The shapes are not the words. They are the flags the words wear. When the flags are well made, the reader forgets them entirely, which is the highest praise a letter can receive.
Semaphore Sans is made for that kind of forgetting. It tries to be plain in the way that good clothing is plain, in the way that good rooms are plain. It tries to be steady, even tempered, and a little bit kind. It would rather be useful than admired, and is therefore quietly admirable.
What follows on the pages ahead are a few small experiments in setting Semaphore Sans at different sizes and to different ends. Read them as one reads any specimen page, with patience and a little curiosity, and listen for the voice underneath the shapes.
A typeface, well made, asks to be looked through, not at. — from the studio notes