Anymade and Displaay Type create a tactile and technical typeface in honour of Robert Moog

Curved and strictly straight at the same time, Roobert is a typeface built from an amalgamation of collaborations. Originally created for the identity of Moogfest, a music, art and technology festival in North Carolina, the typeface spans across six weights and a further twelve styles with italics. Despite being made for a specific event, it’s a typeface that is unmistakably versatile, especially when noting its typographic quirks, after all, “these bent little tubes have got their own backstage story!”

A mono-linear geometrical sans-serif font family, the story of Roobert began when Anymade were commissioned to create Moogfest’s identity last year. A festival hosted and attended by “futurist thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, scientists and musicians,” the identity needed to strike the balance between the tactile and the technical.

Initially, the concept surrounded around the idea of incorporating the actual faces of those performing (Flying Lotus, Gaika, Princess Nokia, Blood Orange and more), at the forefront of the identity. “Well, it soon turned out that not everyone had suitable shots/promo materials available so we came up with the following solution,” Anymade Studio and Displaay Type tell It’s Nice That. “We created a pixel illustration of each artist which was then used as a texture in a 3D animation, digitally mapped out on an undulated/wavy glossy surfaces.” Building upon the initial difficulty of not having imagery to work with soon became the building blocks for the festival’s identity.

From here a typeface was needed, one that would tie in well with this now established visual concept, “and this is where our dear old friend Martin Vacha, the founder of Displaay Type Foundry came in,” explains the studio. “What followed was lots of time spent on drawing and discussing each and every letter, its possible visual representations and available variations,” in turn creating a typeface which works perfectly on posters, the festival’s website, animations and merchandise too.

The Roobert typeface began to develop from its standard version based on the Moog logotype, the revolutionary synthesiser which the festival is named after. An instantly recognisable logotype full of characteristics, particularly the rounded bottom corner of the lowercase “g”, Roobert shows this personality, reflecting nicely in the “a”, “r”, “t” and uppercase “G” and “R” of the typeface. “The whole thing doesn’t stop there — these specific rounded traits can be found across the whole range of Moog products, for example on the keys of their synthesisers. There is also a bit of an extra play in italic styles — here in selected letters the horizontal stems remain vertical.”

Named after Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesiser, the typeface’s name is an ode to him, “we did have a little play with the name, using the double OO from his surname in his first name, and all this is in good faith that he’d agree to this had he been here with us now,” Anymade and Displaay Type explains. Although some of the specialised characters are bespoke to the Moog festival’s identity, the typeface is still available in six weights for you to play with. Displaay and Anymore have also collaborated on a further three other typefaces, Magger, Recklegg and Greed and with even more to come, the “show must go on!”