Description:

Daraz is a leading South Asian e-commerce platform, founded in 2012 by Bjarke Mikkelsen. It has grown into the regions number one e-commerce business, serving over 40 million monthly active users across five markets – Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Myanmar.

DesignStudio APAC worked with the Daraz team over the course of 12 months to overhaul their entire brand experience, from brand strategy, messaging and communications to digital platforms, buyer and seller experiences right through to comms, packaging and delivery.

Working closely with the Group CMO and internal design team we crafted a custom type family designed to unify the brand experience for millions of consumers.

Daraz Sans was developed throughout 2021 as a brand type family for South Asia's largest e-commerce platform, Daraz. As a competitive online retailer there was a need for a typeface to provide more of a distinct brand voice, but also a family that would be adaptable to its changing campaign imagery and environments.

Daraz Sans embodies a warm but idiosyncratic flavour resulting in a unique typographic texture developed for headline use and large contexts. Its strong personality is characterised by its narrow proportions, tight terminals and spacing, compact ascenders / descenders, consistent vertically, and soft outer corners — with a few details borrowed from old enamel road signs to make it stand out.

A bespoke grid system was created specifically for Daraz Sans to aid in developing the family’s precise proportions and consistency of weight. While the forms have a constructed appearance, making the type appear engineered at times, there are moments of humanism smuggled throughout in particular the lowercase ‘a’ and ‘r’. It alternatively evokes the shape and character of vernacular signage, institutional alphabets, modular patterns, and handmade posters.

Daraz Sans boasts some special typographic features, in particular an extensive set of ligatures, arrows, tabular figures and specifically alternate style sets. These alternates change the appearance of text by replacing the default shapes of selected letters with special alternates.

Daraz Type & Shape Motion 1
https://vimeo.com/726896492/c7703ed94a

Daraz Type & Shape Motion 2
https://vimeo.com/726896506/a909dcd88b

Daraz Type & Shape Motion 3
https://vimeo.com/726896515/f2207421e2

Daraz Type & Shape Motion 4
https://vimeo.com/726896542/ee9aa1016e