Rakesly

I released Rakesly on September 25, 2014. My goal was to create a sans serif that drew on the general principles of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metal typefaces without directly copying any of them. I worked from intuition, combining upright styles that carried some of the weight distribution of serif display types with italics that hinted at Art Deco industrial influences. One example is the italic A with a rounded top, a form that was common in Art Deco lettering.

The family launched with six weights and italics, and later I added Rakesly Iron, a textured variation. Those styles weren’t based on letterpress impressions but built digitally. I layered tiling textures in Photoshop, offsetting them automatically at different angles, then converted the results to 1-bit and autotraced them. The process created heavy, detailed textures that suggested the density of letterpress work.

On March 1, 2022, I updated Rakesly by improving OpenType fractions, adding current currency symbols and a capital ẞ, and removing deprecated characters. I also introduced the Rakesly Iron textures as Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. In November 2024, I reorganized the weights: Book was renamed Light, Light became Extra-Light, Extra-Light became Thin, and Ultra-Light became Hairline. Rakesly was initially free, but when I added the textured Iron styles, I made those commercial.

Rakesly never saw much practical use, but for me it was a chance to explore early sans serif ideas in a contemporary context and experiment with texture creation in a digital workflow.