Renée Pitt rejoem display

Finalist
Credits
  • Tauira / Student
    Renée Pitt
  • Kaitautoko / Contributor
    Josiah Rees
  • Kaiako / Lecturers
    Alf Walker, Carl Pavletich, Graeme Kyle
  • School
    Ara Institute of Canterbury
Description:

On average, 14 sets of triplets are born per year in New Zealand and of that, an even smaller amount of identical triplets. It is a pretty rare life experience to be a part of and for that reason, I decided to share my perspective on it.

rejoem; Re (Renee) Jo (Joanna) Em (Emily) is the embodiment of myself and my sisters. It felt completely natural to use this name. Something we created as kids, but so perfectly reflects the inspiration behind the font.

Letterforms need to work coherently as a group, which summarises my purpose for projecting my story through a typeface. Being a triplet is a group, which together is one.

rejoem display is the result of my perspective, driven through a typeface which explores a collective identity. Reflecting on the feelings and emotions of being so close with two people so similar, but different to each other. Its indented stems and unique curves articulate the idea that these feelings have a mental and emotional impact, and become a physical part of who you are as an individual. Using only lowercase letterforms, the font intends to feel soft and meaningful. This also allowed me to really focus on more expressive forms.

It also references the notion of being the 'same but different' with each letter itself being different, but all having an indented stem or curved edge, which therefore makes them similar. The alternates and ligatures are an important extension of this theme as they directly reference triplets. With two alternate characters for a select amount of letters, the letterset can be used to showcase three different letters in slightly different styles. The ligature set leans towards ‘connection’ and can be used to create links across a maximum of three letters.

The typeface aims to not only reflect my own experience, but to hopefully give an insight into what it is like to live in this experience. I don’t think it makes being a triplet any less quirky or strange than it already is, I hope it perfectly shows just how it is exactly that — and it is perfect this way.