LaBrassBanda’s handmade letters

Universal creative Thomas and Martin Poschauko made use of a handmade typography for contemporary Bavarian cult band LaBrassBanda’s artwork. We at TypeMates helped with transferring their creativity to handy type system.

Since several years the two Poschauko twins have been working with LaBrassBanda as their handmade and genuine approach to graphic design fits well to the traditional but cross-over gypsy-brass music.

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The latest artwork for the album Around the World and especially the stage design is fueled by expressive illustrations. Hence to this, even the all-caps typography was planed to keep up with the handmade charm.

To not have to combine each single image of a letter to a headline or even many paragraphs of the lyrics, the most obvious solution was to turn the drawings into a font, proving the possibility to write whatever is needed in the approached style of typography.

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After briefing Thomas and Martin Poschauko which characters might be useful, they send over all letters ready for digitalisation. Thanks to experience gained from hand-crafted Cera Brush, the ideal conversion of authentic grayscale images to monochrome vectors was not quite a big deal.

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Considering different scope of application, two variants of the LaBrasBanda Font were realized: a fine and clean plus a rough and more vital version.

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And well, to avoid unattractive gaps in the text flow, kerning the most necessary combinations of glyphs helped to top off the custom font.

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Last but not least a small gimmick was added: By implementing a clever way of spacing and kerning different special characters can be combined to various decorative patterns.

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Images by courtesy ofThomas and Martin Poschauko.

Further reading