Frontify Future’s bespoke typeface champions the kinetic future of branding

As the cultural landscape shifts, and expectations, tropes and sensibilities move with it, the impact that brands have on their audiences are bound to as well. That’s why brand management tool Frontify has launched Frontify Futures, a platform exploring how brands are due to evolve, both in a practical sense – how they’re built – and how they are interacted with. From the minds of James Fooks-Bale and Tim Noakes, who worked on the creation, commissioning and content direction through Jotter, his new content consultancy, the Futures platform looks to translate its findings into accessible, tangible insight for brands that use Frontify to learn from. However, in order to practice what they preach, Frontify Futures needed its own identity that mirrored its forward-thinking philosophy. 

James and Tim turned to the designer, developer and digital art director Daniel Powell to develop a typographically-led identity that dove into the fluid, non-prescriptive creative space that the platform champions. An experimental ecosystem that set the foundation for an ever-evolving brand. “At the time Frontify Futures was being created, Frontify itself was going through a rebrand,” Daniel says. This rebrand involved a new variable typeface called Cranny, developed bespoke for the company based on Narrow Type’s serif, Azurio. Embracing the typeface as the brand’s aesthetic and conceptual bedrock, Daniel decided to strip Cranny down to its skeleton. 

“We created Crany-Frame and Crany-Hairline,” Daniel says, “these fonts then serve as our base scaffolding, never seen in design, but instead we apply decoration to them to produce new typefaces for each content strand.” This act is one that allows the identity to breath, grow and flow, and is developed upon a custom, node-based system that transforms the typeface it into a type generation tool in its own right. “We used this tool to design the variants for different content strands,” he continues, building a toolset rather than specific letterforms that could evolve within the context or content in which it’s sitting. “That became a big part of the process: designing systems that designers could actually use, not just look at,” he adds, “again it was a wider conversation/concept around the future and how designers and machines can work together.” 

Following this progressive approach to design, each supporting element of the identity, be it the typeface or custom colour palette generator, is designed with what Daniel describes as a “chaos element”; an intentional glitch that conceptually embodies the brand’s concept. “It’s a microstatement about the nature of the future, that it can be anticipated, but never fully known,” Daniel says. In essence, this gives life to the creative system – providing the space necessary to create an unexpected tone of contrasts, digital and human, systematic and spontaneous.

The binary nature was necessary not only to reflect the platform’s interrogation of present and future but also to create a distinctive vibe. “The demands on the typeface are pretty simple – it needed to set an atmosphere,” Daniel says. “The typefaces you see on the website and social essentially only exist in the moment,” he details, “as a string of parameters to create a general style that we use to create live animating versions of the font generated on the fly.” 

This ability equally offered the flexibility required to evolve alongside the creative scene, and indeed, the brand itself. “The whole idea was to make something open enough to keep building on,” Daniel says,. “We’ve already got tools in place to generate new weights, shapes and animated variants and the tool itself still has a ton of unused functionality,” growing as new demands emerge. “It’s less about version numbers and more about ongoing movement,” Daniel ends, “the system’s alive – that’s the point.”