The Gruffalo & Friends

Since its creation, The Gruffalo has grown over time to become ingrained in popular culture. Since the original book, created by author Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler, there have been additional stories and characters added to the world – all brought to life through films, products, attractions, stage shows and digital products.

The popularity of these much-loved stories has increased year-on-year putting pressure on the design assets that represent the brand. [figs. 1 & 2].

1. Some of the many stories by Julia and Axel

Magic Light Pictures, working with their brand consultants Heidi Lightfoot & Co, required an expansion of Axel’s handwriting typeface used for The Gruffalo & Friends brand. Two additional styles were identified; one, a stronger and bolder letter for display purposes, and secondly, a softer and less spikey design for use on materials for babies and toddlers.

In addition to creating two new fonts, the original one needed to be extended and updated with additional language support, punctuation and symbols. In order to do this a bespoke character set was developed which all three fonts could adhere to.

The second feature is the movement of letters over a line of set text [fig 4]. As can be seen in the image, a line of set text has a certain degree of movement to it. The top example shows the text as the font sets it. The bottom one shows text with several letters manually repositioned to add more movement and create better variety. This playful ‘wobble’ can be achieved through variant forms and programming the font technology used, but care needed to be taken to maintain the evenness of the set text.

The style of lettering created by Axel is suggestive of a ruling pen. A calligrapher can use a ruling pen to create all manner of expressive letters. In this instance, however, the potential of the pen is curtailed and used to construct more mannered letter shapes with the benefit of the pens ability to create wide contrasted strokes. With this in mind a range of pens were made from aluminium cans. After replicating the original letter in look and feel, new characters were made to extend the original font, including language specific letters, accents, punctuation, currency and symbols [figs 5 & 6].

5. A set of homemade ruling pens

6. Creating new characters

The design of the other fonts needed to meet the requirements for their intended use. The Strong design had to be quite bold in colour, reduce some of the curls and spikes of the original lettering but very much maintain its essence. The Soft design had to simplify the letter shapes, remove the spikey feel and replace it with more flowing outlines, but keep some of the quirks – and develop new traits in keeping with The Gruffalo look and feel [figs 7–16].

14. The following images show key features across several characters of the Script, Strong and Soft fonts – such as angle, curl and construction

15. Details seen in the Script font are interpreted across the other two fonts. The Strong font simplifies the details and keeps some degree of the rugged character, whereas the Soft font creates a more relaxed, softer shape

16. A cohesive family of related fonts is created by using a similar construction for each style

The various sheets full of letter designs were scanned and auto traced to create vectors. These were then positioned and edited in the font design software to create initial fonts for review [figs 17 & 18].