Industry: Design

Desperados

Breaking letters on purpose: designing damage as a system

Blaze Type was commissioned in summer 2024 to develop a custom typeface for Desperados beer, starting from Anton (Vernon Adams, 2020) rather than designing from scratch. The result, Anton Desperados, exists in two damaged variants—soft and hard—engineered to evoke worn wooden letterpress printing from early 20th-century posters, while evoking both the modernity of the drink and the tradition of a Latin street beer.

Set in Anton, Anton Desperados

Insights

Applying digital textures post-production was rejected because it generates tedious work and does not easily allow last-minute modifications; embedding wear into the font itself was the chosen alternative.
The first distressing step was not aging but mimicking inconsistent historical typesetting: tightening kerning and varying glyph widths to simulate mixed-foundry wooden type, creating a 'dancing' typographic rhythm.
Two parallel variants—soft and hard—were developed simultaneously, with each glyph individually inspected to prevent repeated deterioration patterns that could hurt legibility.
Diacritical characters were given unique wear variations rather than assembled automatically, reinforcing the handmade authenticity of the system.