Giannis Haroulis 2024 Summer Tour poster

While on a recent trip to Greece, Frank Grießhammer sent me this photo of a poster for a Giannis Haroulis concert that uses my font Megazoid. My first thought was “This is cool!” and then it dawned on me – Megazoid doesn’t contain Greek characters!

I did start drawing a Greek version a while back, but I didn’t remember getting it critiqued by a native speaker of the language and I definitely didn’t remember including it in the release. I had to check the type tester on the Type Network and Adobe Fonts websites to be sure … no Greek!

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to identify the resourceful designer who constructed this Greek themselves …. please speak up if it was you! But I had fun trying to reverse-engineer their process.

Starting with the musician’s name, “Γιάννης Χαρούλης”, I figured out the closest approximation I could using the characters in the font “Lıávvns Xapoúyns”, using the alternate single-story a.

Because of Megazoid’s reliance on simple, geometric shapes, most of the letters required no modification at all to work in Greek:

• The Turkish dotless i becomes iota (ι)
• The alternate single-story a becomes alpha (α)
• v becomes nu (ν)
• s becomes final sigma (ς)
• p becomes rho (ρ)
• o becomes omicron (ο)
• u becomes upsilon (υ)

Meanwhile, a handful of letters required some simple transformations:

• Flip the L to make Gamma (Γ)
• Add a descender to n to make eta (η)
• Flip the top half of X to arrive at a vertically-symmetrical Chi (Χ)
• Flip the y to make lambda (λ)

There are a few additional details that changed in the poster … the square counterform in the Χ, the letterspacing of the λ, etc. But that is the gist of it!

I am impressed by this designer’s DIY spirit, and I like some of their solutions better than what I had in my Greek sketch of Megazoid. This was the kick in the pants I needed to finally finish that Greek version of the font and get it out into the world!