The Wall is a condensed, sans-serif typeface that I designed in the Graduate Type Design class at Maryland Institute College of Art, under the guidance of Tal Leming. The task was to design a typeface, over the course of the semester, that addressed a specific design issue. I chose to design one for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 uniforms. For the past several World Cups, the typefaces on the uniforms of all the teams have been pretty generic and some of them are even scaled disproportionately to accommodate all the letters on the uniforms in accordance with the design limitations imposed by the International Cricket Council. Therefore, I wanted to design a typeface that not only addresses the issue but is also varied enough that it imparts a sense of individuality to the different teams.
The idea was to design the alphabets in a way that they retained the classic feel of the typeface used on the 1992 Cricket World Cup uniforms (as shown in the picture above) while modernize the numbers. The text on the front would then act as a unifying element across all uniforms whereas the numbers on the back would be the differentiating element
Image Courtesy: Cricinfo
I had to keep in mind the following design constraints (encircled in the image above) imposed by the International Cricket Council:
a) The maximum area of the bounding box containing the name of the team should not exceed 206.45 sq. cm
b) The minimum height of the letters on the back of the shirt should be no less than 6 cm
I found out that the longest name in terms of width was New Zealand. The second longest was South Africa. Keeping the height of the glyphs fixed to 6cm, I had to limit the width of "New Zealand" to 34.41cm. I also had to ensure that "South Africa" didn't exceed that limit as it has 11 letters while New Zealand has 10. This was the starting point. Once I was able to achieve this, I designed the other glyphs using these two strings as reference points
Currently, The Wall consists of basic all caps and small caps glyphs and five sets of numbers. It is named after the legendary Indian cricketer, Rahul Dravid. I would love to design more styles for the numbers in the future. I was only able to do a few sets because of the timed nature of the task.
