Case Study: Cranny Typeface for Frontify

Frontify is a leading brand management platform that empowers organizations to build, manage, and grow their brand consistently across all touchpoints. Their solutions foster collaboration across teams and ensure brand coherence at every stage.

For their recent rebranding initiative, Frontify selected our typeface, Azurio, which we customized to align perfectly with their evolving brand identity. Frontify sought a distinctive typeface that bridges two essential worlds: human warmth and technological precision. As they articulate their mission, “We make software more human and branding less complex”.

The primary request was to soften and narrow the typeface, enhancing readability and space efficiency for longer texts while ensuring it matched Frontify’s refined brand aesthetic. Our customizations included:

• Redesigning several characters
• Redesigning punctuation
• Compressing the overall typeface width
• Narrowing the letter spacing
• Setting softer alternate forms (a, y, t, Q, and &) as defaults
• Renaming the typeface

Additional refinements involved adjusting joins on capital letters E and F for better clarity at smaller sizes, redesigning the joins and adding serifs to the legs of K and R for greater distinctiveness, and transitioning the punctuation from sharp and calligraphic to a more traditional, rounded style. In line with Frontify’s preference, the customized typeface was renamed Cranny, ensuring a perfect fit with their logo and brand system.