A long tradition of enlarged and decorated initials has shaped the beginnings of texts for centuries. From medieval illuminated manuscripts to early printed books, these letters were used to mark important passages, combining typography with illustration, colour and ornament.
Rather than being used for running text, illuminated initials were designed to stand out, drawing attention to the beginning of a chapter or passage. Each letter became an illustration in its own right, offering plenty of room for decoration, artistic expression and creative experimentation.
Best Caps is a set of drop caps that reimagines this tradition through graffiti. The project explores the parallels between historical illuminated initials and graffiti, two worlds centuries apart that share a fascination with turning letters into elaborate visual compositions.
In graffiti, style is everything. It is not just about what you write, but how you write it. Graffiti pushes letterforms beyond their conventional shapes, playing with proportions and breaking typographic rules. Best Caps brings this energy to illuminated initials by replacing traditional ornament with the visual codes of graffiti.
Colour fonts embed colours and graphic elements into a single font file. Unlike monochrome fonts, which render glyphs using a single fill, colour fonts store multiple layers with individual colour information, creating complex, scalable letterforms without requiring separate fonts for each colour.
Best Caps has been designed and engineered as a colour font, allowing it to be installed and used like a conventional typeface in most modern design applications and web browsers.
Like traditional illuminated initials, Best Caps was primarily designed as a set of individual letters rather than for setting continuous text. However, developing it as a font rather than a collection of vector illustrations allows the characters to be typed and combined into short words and headlines, with their backgrounds overlapping to connect the letters. The idea was never to create another hideous graffiti typeface, but that option is included too.
