Cardiff and Amsterdam-based design studio Smörgåsbord has developed Cymru Wales, a "nation-defining" font family that gives an accurate, digital expression to the Cymraeg language for the first time.
The project was commissioned by the Welsh government as part of a wider rebrand of the country's visual identity. It features the no-frills Cymru Wales Sans which Smörgåsbord originally designed in 2017, alongside a serif font for longer reads and a designated font for the local transport system.
Unlike Cymru Wales Serif (pictured in red), the sans font (pictured in green) features no serifs
To imbue the typography with a unique sense of identity and place, the studio went back to some of the oldest surviving Welsh manuscripts, including The Black Book of Carmarthen and The Red Book of Hergest, which date back to the 13th and 14th century respectively. In collaboration with the Colophon Type Foundry, they set about adopting some of the language's unique stylistic traits into a modern font.
The eight digraphs of the Welsh language are stylised both in the serif (above) and the sans font (below)
Most notably, the it gives an expression to the digraphs that distinguish the Welsh alphabet from the English one. These feature a combination of two letters such as ph or ll to represent a single sound.
Due to the lack of dedicated digital characters, these are generally spelled using two individual letters, but they actually represent a single letter ? much like a German ...