Historic Royal Palaces

We Made This created this brochure series for The Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity looking after sites in London like The Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Banqueting House, and Kensington Palace. The charity’s identity typeface, Farao, lends itself beautifully for lavish illustrative applications. The quirky Egyptienne, designed by František Štorm in 2000, is a joyful typeface with a high stroke contrast between curved joints and heavy serifs, which appear almost darker than the stems. Inspired by historic, sometimes imperfect typefaces of the early 19th century Štorm distilled and exaggerated their perculiarities in a playful way. This results in varied, irregular letter shapes which let us imagine legends, scandals, and princesses with ease all by ourselves.

Because of it’s strong flavor Farao is rather easy to combine with other typefaces by focusing on contrast. In this case, the unpretentious Gotham is a nice complement. But it works well with nearly all grotesques (such as Franklin Gothic, Akzidenz Grotesk, Avenir, Neuzeit) and seriffed text faces.