This is Initium. It is officially my first typeface, but it's nowhere near being finished. As stated in the specimen below, the aim of this typeface is to study the paleographic history and classical proportions of latin letters we use today. It is important to understand the history of everything; where it comes from, and what led to its present form. Why do these strange shapes have any meaning at all? We look look at certain shapes, and as long as they meet certain more or less ambiguous and undefined characteristics, we are able to associate sound and meaning to them. Our Latin alphabet is a strange cocktail of different writing systems from different parts of the world. Our Capitals come from the Romans, our small letters come from France and Germany from an attempt to standardised the informal written hand and our numbers originate from the Middle East and India. Initium, a seemingly ordinary typeface, is also a cocktail of different styles and time periods with a number of different influences. Every decision made during its conception has had and continues to have a reason and some amount of history and tradition behind it. Scroll down for a detailed explanation of the letters. 

These letters are mostly reminiscent of the Classical Antiqua letters from the 18th and 19th centuries, with also keeping in mind their origins from the broadnib and reed pens. Small letters are the most important in a typeface designed for fast readability. When we read words, we do not read individual letters, we read the words a whole. If you sicwth aonrud the lrettes in the mddile, wrods siltl rmaein realadbe. Because of this, these are the letters we've been writing with for Millenia. In the last many centuries, conventions have developed, which results in letters looking strange when they do not conform to these conventions to some extent. It was important to me to understand these conventions and characteristics and have a sense of where they come from and to observe their evolution. After that, it became possible to create what are actually my own letterforms, albeit with a certain amount of conformity to some conventions like the placement of serifs, for example and the general build of the letterforms. Letters like 'a' and 's' however, are significantly wider and differently shaped than those of other typefaces belonging to a similar classification. The serifs are also relatively small and the contrast in stroke width is relatively high. Due to this plethora of influences, I don't believe it would be possible to classify Initium with absolute certainty into any one classification. Initium would then appear to be a paradox... is looks completely ordinary... but its apparent normality has been achieved by not being ordinary. Scroll down for a detailed explanation of the capitals.

The Capitals are a completely different story. For all intents and purposes, they have absolutely nothing to do with the small letters. We have just been conditioned to understand these two completely separate writing systems as one single system. Despite that, they do serve a purpose. While small letters are easier to read, primarily because of their varying height, making it easier to read each word as an image rather than individual letters, Capitals serve to highlight important information, like the beginning of a sentence or a proper noun. In languages like German, all nouns are capitalised.

As I mentioned earlier, the capital letters, as we know them today, originated in Rome. In his book, the Origin of the Serif, Edward. M. Catich explains his theory of not only the origin of the serif, but also the technique and history behind the roman capitals in general. Roman Letterers employed a technique of brush writing, where they would make swift strokes with varying brush angles, creating the contrast in stroke with and also their serifs. These letters were then chiseled out of stone and then painted once again. A common misconception is that the work of the chisel was the primary medium and focus of Roman lettering. Cutting the letters into the stone was incidental, as a way of preserving the brush writing. It was the brush writing which was the primary medium. Initium's capitals have taken inspiration from both the brush written Roman capitals as well as later renditions found in the Renaissance Antiqua typefaces we know so well from most of the books we read. This is because we are used to these Capitals looking a certain way and it would look strange to see pure Roman capitals in a typeface like this. This is why I have handpicked certain characteristics and qualities from them, like the lack of a complete serif on the right arm of the 'A' and the middle arm of the 'E' and 'F', or the width of letters like 'S', 'E', 'F', 'P' and 'R' which were drawn significantly narrower by the Romans.