Crypto-typography – the passion for unknown, weird and unusual character shapes – is a disease commonly affecting type designers. Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini has celebrated it in this typeface family, aptly named Hagrid after the half-blood giant with a passion for cryptozoology described by R. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter books. Extreme optical corrections, calligraphic counter-spaces, inverted contrast, over-the-top overshoots: all the inventions that abound in vernacular and experimental typography have been lovingly collected in this mongrel sans serif family, carefully balancing quirky solutions and solid grotesque design.
Hagrid is a typeface designed for editorial & display use, bringing dynamism to the printed and digital page thanks to its extreme contrast and unique details. It has been developed in a range of six display weights ranging from the monolinear and more traditional thin to the expressive heavy weight. For better readability in small sizes and on the web, a companion text family has been developed, with a slightly different selection of weights, wider metrics, and fine adjustments to keep the dynamic expressivity of the design without sacrificing legibility. This is evident in the design of italics: while the display italics sport a cursive feel with calligraphic terminals to lowercase letters, the text design is more restrained, with a more classical geometric grotesque slanted look.
Given the crypto-typographer love for foreign specimens of letters, special care has been put into making Hagrid ready for multilingual projects, giving it an extended character sets covering over two hundred languages that use latin, cyrillic and arabic alphabets and adding a selected range of Open Type features to handle alternate forms and stylistic sets.
