Prince: The Beautiful Ones

A dream project to design Prince’s memoirs lead to early discussions about what would be the right typographic voice for Prince. Depending on the era, he had an amazing gift to transform and reinvent himself.

Pialat, by Commercial Type, was a typeface we had admired for a long time after first seeing it in the pages of the New York Times’ T Magazine. We decided it was perfect for this. The proportions of the letterforms, and the subtle flares channeled the 70s in our opinion, when Prince was first launching his career and influenced by Funk. The decadence of the thick-and-thin contrast spoke to Prince’s fascination with all things sensuous that he would then tap into over his entire career. Unfortunately Prince died before this book was published but we would hope he would have approved of this choice. For the body text we selected Gerard Unger’s Amerigo. The angular sharpness of the face, even at a small scale, to us channeled Prince from the 90s and some of the typography from the albums of that era. It’s such a robust and readable typeface despite its edgy characteristics and we always wanted an excuse to use it in a project.