Platelet comes in three weights – Thin, Regular and Heavy. The lowercase ‘b’ incorporates the uppercase form, dramatically increasing its recognition factor, and the uppercase ‘B’ shows a hint of an ascender.
However the most striking design solutions are to be found in the ‘b’ and ‘B’. Other characters of note are a very beautiful lowercase ‘g’ and ‘k’, and a cute rounded uppercase ‘A’ and ‘E’. Conversely, instead of adding the traditional extended serifs to the lowercase ‘i’ and ‘l’, a large curved lead-out stroke helps fill their width. To avoid that the three stems create a density problem, the middle ones have been shortened. As every character must fit in the same width, the lowercase ‘m’ and ‘w’ need to be condensed quite a bit. Platelet’s design includes some peculiar character shapes that address the reduced legibility of geometric designs, and offers some clever solutions to the problems inherent to monospaced designs. The oldstyle figures generously extend above and below the x-height, another very recognisable feature. This opens up numerous options for creative type composition and playful combinations. The design retains the monospaced quality of the original alphabet, which is not only a technical requirement but also ensures that a fixed number of characters fit onto a plate with maximum legibility at a distance.Ī distinctive trait of Platelet is the capitals that are exactly as tall as the x-height, thus allowing for unicase setting. The very first license plate font that caught my attention was the Emigre release Platelet by Conor Mangat, a loose interpretation of the letters and numbers on California license plates. The original character set are limited to the capitals and numerals, leaving a considerable amount of freedom for the type designer when completing and expanding them. What’s interesting about these fonts is that the source alphabets are by definition incomplete.
Those range from almost literal translations to freestyle interpretations. Some typeface designers have been inspired by those peculiar shapes to create digital adaptations. The fact that their shapes are defined by technical requirements rather than by aesthetic considerations, and the need for differentiation to avoid confusion between similar characters often leads to rather awkward, and in some cases downright bizarre letter forms. There’s something about their mechanical aesthetic: characters forcefully stamped into metal, which results in those typical rounded corners. Yet those letters and numbers exert a certain appeal on designers – they certainly have intrigued me personally since I noticed those wondrous new shapes on the German license plates halfway the nineties.
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