Dengue Fever

Much like music, typefaces demand an emotional response. Music does this through melody, type does so with form. ‘Dengue Fever’ is a display typeface created for large print formats, album artwork, and headlines.

The project was to create a typeface inspired by a musical artist. ‘Dengue Fever’ is inspired by the music and sound of the Cambodian rock band of the same name and derives its unique forms from the Khmer alphabet. The trills and loops of ‘Dengue Fever’ capture the energy of the rock and roll genre and blends it with references of rich Cambodian culture.

Creating ‘Dengue Fever’ allowed me to see how much goes into creating a typeface. Recognizing the depth and eye for detail required to create the forms that make up individual characters in a typeface helped strengthen my own eye for typography and type design.

Working on a project intimately tied with letter-forms opened my eyes to the most substantial aspects of typography, and good typography is fundamental to good design. Drawing the typeface in RoboFont taught me the fundamentals of type design such as which letters share similar glyphs, and the ins-and-outs of proper letter spacing.

The type specimen booklet provides a closer look at ‘Dengue Fever’ and the album cover serves as the secondary specimen; showing the typeface used in action. Utilizing one color, texture and line-art as imagery gives the typeface room to be the most expressive part of the album cover and type specimen.

‘Dengue Fever’ is an OpenType font created using font editor RoboFont. Special thanks to Sibylle Hagmann and Frederik Berlaen for providing the necessary tools and guidance during the creation of this typeface.