The Orrong Hotel

The Orrong Hotel is a down-to-earth-peoples Pub. We worked with owner Scott to develop a mark and custom typeface to honour the pubs heritage. Having gone through many on-trend renovations, Scott and his team stripped back the pub revealing the heritage and the romance of yesteryear.

Much like the Pub renovation concept, our typeface was influenced by found type specifically old sign writing in the upstairs rooms.

The challenge for the typeface was to balance the hand painted found forms with digital reproduction. Allowing too much variance and hand paintedness would make the typeface unstable and too little would make the typeface stale and untrue to the original character. Some of the letters were obvious standouts like the W, which were kept in full.

We used the construction of the letter S as the design theory, being that if we switch the weighting from the typical verticals to the horizontals the undefinedness would be maintained, but an overall harmony for a working typeface would remain intact.