Zuzanna Górska

The project

Escada is a display typeface inspired by twentieth-century advertising lettering and the expressive qualities of brush pen strokes. While drawing on historical references, the design reinterprets them through a contemporary lens, combining dynamic forms with stencil-like elements. It is characterized by the movement of brush pen strokes, a distinctive 12-degree slant, and intentional breaks within curved forms that create a sense of rhythm while balancing its handcrafted quality with a structured display character.

Designed primarily for branding, Escada is particularly suited to visual identities in gastronomy, culture, design, and craftsmanship, and also works well for display typography in editorial design, packaging, posters, and other short-form printed matter. The family currently consists of Light, Regular, and Bold weights and is available as a variable font, with all styles sharing the same character set of Basic Latin and diacritics covering most European languages, numerals, and basic punctuation.

Concept

Escada's references come from Belle Époque and early twentieth-century advertising posters (cycling, entertainment, and department-store lettering such as the work found in period bicycle and Parisian cabaret posters) whose hand-painted, brush-driven letterforms suggested a display face built around dynamic, gestural strokes combined with stencil-like breaks in the curves.

Process

Górska worked from handwriting samples and marker sketches, testing letterforms with red annotations to refine curves, joints, and rhythm before digitizing them into the Escada family. The original concept envisioned a broader superfamily, including a complementary slab-serif companion designed to work alongside the expressive script style and offer a more neutral, text-oriented counterpart for complex typographic compositions; an initial sketch of this companion was developed, but due to the parallel demands of her diploma project, Górska focused on completing the script-based style that currently forms the foundation of the family, leaving extended punctuation and additional diacritic support for other language systems in progress.