A to Z: Vegemite Typeface by Allison Colpoys

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What do killer spiders, sunburn, and Vegemite all have in common? They're all things you'll find in every Australian household!

Vegemite - our favourite of the three - is quintessentially Australian and a treat we hold very close to our hearts. So when advertising agency JWT Melbourne presented us with the opportunity to create a custom typeface for the iconic brand we hopped on our kangaroos and headed straight to artist Allison Colpoys' house to get her on board. Now all we needed was Vincent Chan - typographer extraorinnaire - to do all the coding/programming/technical mumbo-jumbo and we were good to go!

To create the typeface, Allison got to work experimenting with various mediums including watercolour, ink, chinagraph, grey lead pencil, and even played around with using Vegemite itself! She toyed with varying lengths of ascenders and descenders, italic and roman forms, squiggly and not so squiggly, and so on.

Ink

Watercolour

Vegemite

Testing potential headlines

A range of quirky pangrams helped Allison to see how the letters would work together.

Once JWT and Kraft signed off on the character designs it was time to get started on the digitisation process. We needed to find a way to retain the looseness of Allison's natural handwritten charm whilst still producing a legible and easily adjustable typeface. This meant a LOT of testing and a LOT of rounds of revision.

After toying with many options, Vincent came up with a great solution - a rotator algorithm that ensures that no two letters within a nine-character span would look the same. Allison created three options for each character and Vincent's algorithm ensures that as you type, the font alternates between each option. Clever!

Vincent even included a super useful toggle function, meaning that if the combination of letters put forward by the algorithm isn't quite right, future typesetters can change the combination of glyphs with the click of a button.

Throw in a stack of ligatures and terminal forms (nice squiggly letters in the middle and ends of words) and our typeface was feeling natural, organic, and full of character*.

*Yeah! Type puns!

Developed as an OpenType font, Vincent thought ahead and tested it across various versions of Microsoft Office and a range of other applications.

And there you have it! The final typeface, ready to be used across all of Vegemite's communications.

Everyone agreed the new Vegemite typeface was a perfect fit for the brand, making us all very happy little Vegemites!

Pushed out across a range of different executions - including billboards, print ads, TVCs, web banners, and more - you'll find Allison and Vincent's font across Australia now.