Can any logo become a typeface?

Only if the letters follow rules you can measure. Ours did: five equal bands, stems heavier than bars, and one repeated cut. A wordmark drawn letter by letter with no shared system gives you five glyphs to copy and nothing to extend.

Why build a text font as well?

A display face built from a logo is good for headlines and short labels in capitals. Body copy needs lowercase, smaller sizes and quieter shapes, so we drew a second family on the same corners and terminals and left out the details that only work large.

Is the font for sale?

No. It's for Alterra's own brand. The same process works for a client wordmark, and it usually belongs in a rebrand or a brand refresh.

How we turned our logo into a type family

The short version

The Alterra wordmark splits its cap height into five equal bands, and every stem that meets a top bar stops one band short. Those two rules are enough to draw a whole alphabet.
A, L, T, E and R are traced from the logo file, so the font sets ALTERRA exactly as the logo does. The other letters are drawn on the same grid.
The family is Alterra Primary in Light, Regular and Bold for headlines, plus Alterra Secondary in Regular, Medium and Bold for copy and interface.

What we measured

The wordmark is a 2,000-pixel-wide image with a cap height of 239 pixels. Measured row by row, it splits into five bands: a top bar, a gap, a middle bar, a gap and a bottom bar, each about 48 pixels tall. Stems are 62 pixels wide, so verticals are about 30% heavier than horizontals. That contrast is part of why the logo looks solid rather than thin.

The detail that makes it ours is the gap band. On E, T and R the stem stops one band below the top bar, so the bar floats. We call it the cut. Every other rule in the family follows from it.

From a logo file to a type family

01MeasureThe wordmarkCap height in five equal bands, stems 182 units, bars about 140, and the cut: a stem that meets a top bar stops one band short.
02TraceA, L, T, E, RTraced from the file at four times its size. The traced letters cover 98.6% of the logo's pixels.
03GrowThe other capitalsDrawn on the same grid with the cut and R's angles. S, O, U, D and N come from the Studio and Editions lockups.
04ExtendSix weightsAlterra Primary in Light, Regular and Bold; Alterra Secondary in Regular, Medium and Bold, with lowercase for copy.

From the measurements in this guide.

Tracing the five letters

We didn’t redraw the logo letters. A, L, T, E and R are traced from the original file at four times its size, then scaled onto a 700-unit cap height. Laid over the logo, they cover 98.6% of the same pixels, and the difference sits in the anti-aliased edges. When the font sets ALTERRA, it is the logo.

Growing the alphabet

The rest of the capitals use four rules measured from those five letters:

The grid. Bars sit in the same five bands. Stems are 182 units and bars about 140.
The cut. A stem that meets a top bar stops one band short. B, C, D, F, G and P carry it as well as E, T and R.
Shared angles. R’s diagonal and leg set the angles for P, B and K. V is the logo’s A turned upside down.
Corners. Small rounding on a stem’s top-left and a bar’s bottom-right, and a larger radius where a stroke turns.

S, O, U, D and N come from our Studio and Editions lockups, which already had their own versions of those letters. When the first S didn’t match, we rebuilt it from the lockup rather than defending the guess.

Three weights and a text companion

Bold is the logo’s weight. Light and Regular rebuild A, L, T, E and R on the grid, because a traced letter only exists at one weight. As a check, we rebuilt those five at Bold weight and compared them with the logo: they overlapped 96%, with the differences only along the edges.

Alterra Secondary is the supporting family. It has upper and lowercase, normal widths and the same corners and cut terminals. It drops the cut and gives A a crossbar, so it stays readable at 18 pixels. Display sets the headline and Text sets everything under it.

How it was made

Every glyph is generated by code: the outlines, the spacing, the kerning and the names Windows needs to group the weights. Changing a rule and rebuilding updates every letter that uses it. The film above draws the same geometry in Rive. It opens on the contour map from our homepage with the word raised as a mesa, then takes the land away to show the grid underneath. The clicks and bells are synthesised clockwork, timed to each event on screen. The case study shows the grid, the cut and the weights side by side.

What we’d do differently

We’d collect every piece of existing lettering before drawing anything. The Studio and Editions lockups already answered questions we spent time guessing at, like the shape of S.