Alpha Strada is a versatile display font with bold personality, heritage flair, and a luxury feel. It’s built for high-end branding, editorial design, and retro-modern visual identities.

STYLES

Alpha Strada: Regular. A clean, sans serif font that works as complimentary copy text for the headline Racer style.

Alpha Strada: Racer. The headline display font that carries through the vintage baseline (or underline) look.

CONCEPT AND REVISION

Illustrated by this pencil sketch, my initial concept for this font was based on underline curves joining each letter like a script font, with half circular shapes reflecting the main characters above. While this created an effective flow with specific letter combinations, I found it hard to master when used across the full alphabet. This led to further exploration of alternative styles before deciding on a straight underline look that was immediately reminiscent of chrome badges on classic cars.

This is typical of how my projects unfold. A simple idea will lean into a direction that I wasn’t necessarily aiming for, but seems obvious when I hit on, ‘the look’. Research into usage cases for this style of lettering revealed countless examples of car branding as expected, but also European art deco signage, American diners, and more contemporary uses on album covers— all aspects to keep in mind for this design and future projects.

Plenty of experimentation was conducted with the joining elements, gradually moving away from the initial half-circle concept to a more tick-like shape, and eventually a simplified straight line. The circular joined proved problematic when connecting letters with sharp diagonals like ‘x’ and ‘y’, causing the letters to lose their underlying geometry and appear awkward. Therefore, this idea is set aside for another font where I have more flexibility with the letter shapes.

UNDER THE HOOD: Using the Alternative Characters

The perfect font for brands with a racing heritage.

Alpha Strada, designed for functionality, also offers ‘Starters’ and ‘Stoppers’. These are additional options that provide a clean start or end to any text combination. For example, in the GIRO example, the regular font variant leaves a trail on either side of the text, which may not be desired. To address this issue, you can simply switch characters as needed. In this case, I’ve used the starter ‘G’ and stopper ‘O’ to create a visually symmetrical treatment. The addition of a matching border demonstrates this font’s potential in logo design.

Besides the italics that are available for all styles, this font also includes a selection of alternative characters that can dramatically alter the appearance of your text. For instance, the lowercase ‘e’ can be changed from a tilted to a straight configuration, and the angular or curved ‘M’s, ‘A’s, and ‘F’s can also be accessed from the Glyphs panel in most programs that handle type. Additionally, there’s the SuperCaps variant, another alternative that adds a go-faster stripe to the capitals, making this a highly versatile font is suitable for logos, editorial content, and more.

FONT SPECIMENS

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