Irancell Typeface
Since MTN Irancell started working in 2006, it picked a font to use in its corporate identity and hasn’t been changing it since then. Until February 2017 while redesigning its corporate identity, a new typeface was used in the company’s ads and logo.
The previous font for this company (Yakout) had some weaknesses, and its most important flaw was that it did not match the company’s personality. Having a young and active spirit, with the young target market, Irancell needed a corporate identity and typeface that matches its personality. On the other hand, Yakout was not able to cover the needs of legibility and attracting attention on different media like billboards and websites. Another serious problem was that the font was not exclusive, which was why any brand in any area could use it. Since writing and texts are important parts of advertising, and there is a great amount of using them in ads, designing an exclusive typeface could have a huge impact on brand's place.
Irancell typeface is a young and energetic typeface that has been designed for the brand’s personality and it’s the young target market. The forms in characters are very simple and familiar. I tried to keep the balance between geometric and organic structures in the forms and in the strokes’ thickness. The proportions led to a high quality and legible typeface while keeping it modern and up to date. Tall and clear teeth, open contours, and the generous spaces between words guarantee the text’s legibility in any condition. Since Irancell uses numbers and punctuations like asterisks, hash, and… a lot, and because of their importance, these characters were designed in a very careful way and reconsidered many times to completely match the letters. Also, because of the vast usage of English terms such as 4G, TD-LTE, etc. matching English and Farsi letters was essential.
The typeface’s usage was highly considered in Irancell typeface design, so it would fit both in print and digital areas, and do really well in long texts like catalogs and brochures, and outdoor advertising like billboards. Ligatures and alternative letters for this typeface built great potentials for lots of beautiful, functional and effective typography designs.
This typeface with 7 weights has been designed by Reza Bakhtiarifard in 2017-2023 for MTN Irancell Telecommunication Company, and can’t be purchased. Not to mention that extra light, light, and bold weights were co-designed with Omid Emamian and ExtraBlack weight were co-designed with Mahdi Ershadi.