99: the story of the Touchline font
Sustainability Director
Why we created our custom typeface
Back in 2017, we decided to create a custom typeface for Touchline as part of a brand refresh. We wanted something uniquely ours that referenced our heritage and gave a sense of our personality. A new typeface was integral to the refresh because it’s a constant in our brand’s communication – even when everything else is stripped away, the typeface remains as a constant visual identifier.
We soon established that to feel like ‘us’, our typeface needed to feel elegant but approachable. It should marry tradition and modernity to represent our agency’s work: underpinned by deep experience, and at the forefront of new technology and trends.
It also needed to connect to our roots. Today, Touchline is an integrated communications agency. However, our earliest days were born in journalism and publishing. Compelling storytelling is the red thread that’s always run through our work. Keen for our typeface to convey this, we researched 20th century newspaper typefaces and explored how we could bring them up to date.
25 lessons from 25 years
Insights and learnings from a quarter century in strategic communications
With this brief in mind, we approached the typography experts Colophon Foundry, a small but mega-talented agency local to us who have gone on to create typographic assets for Instagram, Google, Cadillac and Burger King.
The Colophon team worked their magic and ‘99’ was born. On the eve of our 25th anniversary, it still feels as fresh and fitting as ever.
Its elements of playfulness and humanistic feel combine with elegant curvature and a nod to old-school fonts like Bookman. The 99 name is multilayered – as well as connecting to the agency’s founding in the year 1999, it also references the informal name for speech marks (66 for opening and 99 for closing).
As part of the same brand refresh, we created a new graphic device, also inspired by quotation marks. The two elements combined created our simple but effective logo: the Touchline name in 99 typeface locked up with this device. Although the exact shape of the quotation marks has evolved over the years to become cleaner and sharper, the messaging behind it has remained consistent. Whatever the next 25 years hold for Touchline, storytelling will remain at our core.
