Platypi Typeface By David Sargent

This project started in 2022 as part of the Type West Certificate in Type Design course run by the Letterform Archive in San Francisco.

I was part of an online cohort of around twenty students, and the course ran for a full year. Type West was a fantastic experience with amazing instructors, and I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to develop their knowledge on type. They run one in-person and one online cohort per year.

Our assignment was to create a body text serif typeface, and I was interested in how far I could push the design while still keeping it readable. The heavy, pointed serifs came from this idea. Early in the process, I thought they looked like little platypus tails or webbed feet and ran with that concept. The biggest challenge was balancing pointed shapes with softer, rounded forms, and what worked on a single letter might not have worked when combined into words and longer text. The design went through a lot of iterations to get this right!

What's funny is that the platypus was once considered to be a hoax — people thought it was multiple animals sewn together. I feel like Platypi shares this spirit with a mash-up of pointed serifs with more delicate strokes and framing. Somehow, I pulled it off, and the result is an interesting triangular pattern that appears along lines of text. 

While at Type West, I completed a light, bold, and italic version, but continued to work on the project afterwards to where it is today. I linked up with Troy Leinster and his Type Masters program at this stage, and with his help, redrew most of the letterforms and polished any rough edges. It was released on Google Fonts in 2024 and has had over 100 million uses to date.

What I'm most proud of is the language support that Platypi offers. It supports over 300 languages, including all Australian Indigenous languages. The project is still ongoing, and I'm currently drawing a bunch of new glyphs that will extend this to 500 supported languages.