Harri Display family

Harri (“stone” in Basque language) is a display font based on the peculiar lettering style used in signs and fascias all over the Basque Country. This idiosyncratic lettering, very often used as an identity signifier, derives from ancient inscriptions carved on gravestones which can still be found in the French part of the Basque Country (Behe Nafarroa, Lapurdi and Zuberoa). Harri display take some of its more significant features from those engraved letterforms, but also from the current overemphasized shapes derived from them as well as their antecesors, the Romanesque inscriptions and ultimately the Roman Capitals. Gerard Unger once said “the black version of a font is a caricature of the regular”. This may explain how the odd heavy shapes in use today might have evolved from their engraved roots, which are already an interpretation of Romanesque and Roman letterforms. The different weights of Harri try to reflect this evolution from the clean formal Roman-like light, to the fat extreme Basque-looking black.