MyBaby Typeface
Lively, Tender, Kind, Curious, Calm, Fragrant, Playful, Caring, Heroic, MyBaby. These words create an image of a childlike world—a world we sought to bring to life through typography.
We began by designing the display style and concluded that an organic and spontaneous feel was essential for characterization. Achieving this required a soft, flexible, absorbent, and somewhat uncontrollable tool. A simple cotton swab seemed like an unusual choice, but turned out to be the perfect solution. With it, we could define the skeleton and writing direction of the letters while allowing details to take shape unpredictably.
In typeface design, letters with shared structures, such as "ج، چ، ح، خ," are typically designed identically, and variations in their initial, medial, final, and isolated forms are minimized. Similarly, dots are usually kept uniform. However, considering that every child is unique with distinct characteristics, we approached each character as an individual entity. Thus, we designed similar letters differently, treated letter forms as independent personalities, and applied this approach across all characters. The same principle guided the design of numerals, dots, and other symbols.
For the text style, we initially used the skeleton of the display style forms. Long texts and small-sized typography required adjustments for better readability while also needing to appear more formal and trustworthy. So we significantly increased the letter height, maintained commonalities in character design (such as "ج، چ، ح، خ"), unified the initial, medial, final, and isolated forms, and also for dots shapes, omitted alternate letterforms, and retained only the most essential ligatures.
Because some texts were small and packed with information, the print material greatly affected readability. For instance, the text on a paper label of a detergent bottle appears sharp and clean, while the same text printed on diaper and wet wipe packaging which is made of nylon, appears bolder and less legible. To address this, we designed a version specifically for small text on packaging, maintaining the proportions of the text style but refining details and spacing. Characters became flatter, stems and teeth were elongated, eyes slightly enlarged, and the tails of "ر" and "و" extended for better visibility. The spacing between characters and words, as well as overall white space, was increased. Given the importance of numerals on packaging, we also redesigned them for improved legibility.
Next, we moved on to designing the English font for the display style. Drawing inspiration from the Persian characters' attributes—such as "high energy and curvatures," "spontaneity and playfulness," "varied yet harmonious forms," and "contrast in stroke thickness"—we crafted the English counterpart to achieve a cohesive tone. A more legible and formal numeral set was also designed for special situations.
The MyBaby typeface was designed by Reza Bakhtiarifard and Mahdi Ershadi under the direction of Mitra Shahsavand in 2022 for Zarrin Roya Co.