Mercuryo website and identity

Karloff Neutral is used for the website and identity of payment aggregator Mercuryo. From Ivan Velichko, creative director at Moscow-based design studio Shuka (via type.today):

Mercuryo had an idea of a product: to make paying in crypto currency as easy as paying with regular, ‘fiat’ money. At the time, everyone was mostly buying Bitcoin or Ethereum, but you couldn’t use those in your daily life.

We had little knowledge of crypto currency problems, but it sounded amazing. One of the founders looked like a true British dandy — in a waistcoat and beautiful socks, which gave us an idea of Alice in Wonderland with the trickster White Rabbit whose ears are sticking out of a hat.

To complete all this we needed a typeface, something Clarendon-like. Kazimir and Robert are too smooth and fancy, they made everything look rather boring than as an identity, — even though a ‘right’ and ‘quality’ typeface was exactly what we were looking for.

We tried Karloff right away, even before we considered the two aforementioned typefaces, and yet we were attempting to replace it all along — this typeface is not very convenient with its long ascenders and descenders. However, it did have this trickster vibe that we needed.

This entire time I bore it in my mind and at some point just realised that those long, old-fashioned ascenders are giving the right feeling, too. At the very least, they are rhyming with the rabbit’s ears, and Karloff is an excellent complement to the boring and mechanistic sans serif used for body text.

Read the whole article on the type.today website.

Karloff was conceived by Peter Biľak and designed by Pieter van Rosmalen with Nikola Djurek. Maria Doreuli translated the design to Cyrillic and Greek. In the Mercuryo identity, Karloff Neutral is paired with Brutal Type by Dmitry Rastvortsev and Gayaneh Bagdasaryan. Creative and art direction by Ivan Vasin. Design and illustration by Mary Yudina.