Rationale

Rag Type is a typeface designed solely to be knitted as a way of introducing the digital through traditional means. The purpose of this typeface is to be used within a knitting kit that is very accessible for many audiences whether they are beginners at knitting, young or old. It can be used for educational purposes such as bringing back traditional forms of craft to younger audiences, or introducing digital and modernised typefaces to older audiences.

This typeface is digital, physical, pixelated and simplified. A majority of the designing for this typeface came through a starting point based on a grid structure, and then was developed through varying experimentations through knitting into a rag rug base. The way Rag Type translates digitally is different to the way in which it translates through knitting as sharp, square grids cannot be formed through yarn loops. More conventionally, Rag Type would have a shorter ascender and cap-height to create more of an overall square shape to each glyph as this is more common in pixelated typefaces, however on a rag rug grid, more grids are needed to create height than digitally. The way it translates through knit is its actual visual form, and the digital representation is based solely on the number of grids used in the rag rug base. 

As Rag Type is meant to represent a digitalised, modern type far from fonts traditionally used through knitting, I based it on inspiration from binary codes and conventions of pixel typefaces in which it’s completely angular and follows a strict grid physically and digitally. It uses many of the same shapes, such as for the counters in lowercase letters such as ‘e’ and s’ which match the terminals of lowercase letters such as ‘c’. Uppercase letters in Rag Type often look exactly like lowercase letters but at cap-height as the typeface is meant to be very consistent. This consistency is what allows it to be very accessible for many audiences, and most design choices were based on this need for accessibility and legibility as knitted typography often can be very inconsistent.