Teip started out as a typographic exploration of overlapping tape where a over / under, foreground / background interplay would be a stylistic motif throughout. By overlapping two colors of tape, I built a rough mockup of several characters (H A M B U R G E F O N T S I V) to get a feel for how I wanted the whole system to work.

With the system and method figured out, and sticking to a rigid grid, I created simplified digital representations of the outlines of the pieces of tape while leaving the ends open. At that point the open style was solidified. Soon after, a closed style and a lined style developed. From the lined version I then developed two inline styles to open up the possibility of layering to easily remix the look of the typeface.

For the most part, the uppercase characters have a vertical stress in the foreground, while lowercase have the horizontal stressed in the foreground. Because this is a unicase typeface, upper and lower case glyphs can be mixed for a more random feel in the shape of individual words and the flow of sentences.

Uppercase

Lowercase

In Teip, glyph widths and kerning are the same across all styles and weights. This opens up the ability to layer one style on top of another to easily create a large number of color and stylistic combinations.