Studholme

Alex Lahr
2020

Regular & Italic
Peckham lido
Discretionary ligatures and contextual alternates
Old Germanic umlauts and text from the classic German folktale of "Die Geschichte vom bösen Friedrich" (misbehaving Friedrich)
Selected glyphs, Regular & Italic

I moved from Chicago to Southeast London’s Peckham neighborhood in 2019 and began creating Studholme in 2020. Inspired by Peckham’s storied history, Studholme is a typeface available in Roman and Italic that draws on classical forms and drags them to the present.

Studholme, essentially meaning "horse pen" in Old English, is both enclosed by long-standing typographic traditions (pulling from Old Germanic and English forms) and freed from them, using dramatic ligatures and more exaggerated shapes to burst forth into the now. It's inspired by calligraphy but is uniquely contemporary.

The specimen sheet and accompanying images utilize illustrations and text from Charles Singer's 1920 book "Early English Magic and Medicine," (available via public domain) and similarly available historical images of Southeast London, to highlight the fluidity of typographic forms and how glyphs and their shapes transform — and stay the same — over time.

Designer
Alex Lahr