About us
Rope is a fictional type foundry created by Shiva Nallaperumal and Iris Sprague as part of their thesis project (2015) at the GD MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Iris concentrates on designing Theo, a large super family exploring different styles in the history of type with one skeleton. Theo is a super family containing the complementary sub families Theo Humanist & Theo Grotesque (Sans), Theo Text (Serif) and Theo Italian (Display) each with a range of weights and matching italics/obliques.
Shiva explores a range of typographic problems and solutions through the design of several different type families for specific and non specific uses. Among them are a quasi artificially intelligent display face, a reverse stress sans for text, a humanist sans and slab with contradictory strokes, a caption face for extremely small sizes and a ridiculous informal sans.
Rope is the name that binds these separate projects together to form a fictional type foundry. The designers will post various specimens, in-use examples, and images related to the project in the months leading up to their final thesis critique. Availability and release of these typefaces will be announced when they are ready for publication.
This project was done under the guidance of Tal Leming, Ellen Lupton, Jennifer Cole Phillips and Abbott Miller. Special thanks to Satya Rajpurohit, Ken Barber, Peter Bilak and Greg Gazdovicz.
