ZODIAK
Specimen
The Zodiak Font Specimen was made for a typography course at university, and it had me really dig into the anatomy of a typeface: bowls, spines, bracketed serifs, x-height, the kind of detail you don't notice about a font until you're forced to look for it. Zodiak turned out to be a great typeface to study that way, a sturdy display serif with a tall x-height and 19th-century-inspired letterforms, with enough personality in its details to build a set of posters around. I built four spreads that each pull apart a different side of it: the display weight, the full alphabet and numerals, the italic range, and a closing spread mixing a mirrored wordmark with the full specimen text.
It's one of those projects where the constraint, just one typeface, ended up teaching me more than any amount of casual font-browsing would have. Looking that closely at a single design forces you to notice choices you'd otherwise skim past: why a serif is bracketed instead of straight, why the x-height sits where it does, how much personality can live in a single curve. It changed how I look at every typeface I use now, not just Zodiak.