The Story Behind Capitalis Amoris

I've always liked letters. Long before design school. As a kid I used to copy famous logos and collect them in a sort of sketchbook. Simple shapes, сounterforms. There was something strangely compelling about the way individual signs come together to form a word.

When I started United Love, I knew one thing from the beginning: I wanted the brand to have its own voice. That included the typeface.

There are thousands of beautiful fonts out there. I use many of them in my work. But every typeface already comes with its own history and its own personality. Some feel cold. Some feel elegant. Some feel loud. Some have become so familiar that they almost disappear. None of them felt like United Love.

I wanted something contemporary, but not fashionable. Minimal, but not sterile. Calm, but with enough character that you could recognize it without knowing why. A few irregularities for good measure. Tiny details, almost invisible. Just enough to remind you that another human being drew these letters.

Over time the typeface became as much a part of the brand as the logo or the illustrations. Today United Love is a custom typography brand in the most literal sense: every message is written in a typeface created specifically for it.

Every new letter still begins the same way. With a pencil. Usually I sketch only a handful of characters first. Most type designers know the word hamburgefonstiv. I've always liked it for two reasons. It starts with Hamburg, just like United Love, and it contains almost every important proportion and spacing relationship you need to judge a typeface. If those letters work together, the rest of the alphabet usually follows.

After that the drawing moves into the font editor. From there it's mostly small adjustments. Bézier curves. Side bearings. Spacing. One curve moves slightly to the left. Another becomes a little flatter. Export. Print. Look again. Repeat. Most of the work happens at a scale nobody will ever consciously notice.

The first version contained only one weight. It worked well on T-shirts, where most messages are short. But once I started writing longer sentences, I realized that the regular version wasn't enough. Longer messages needed a little more density without becoming heavier.

So I designed a condensed bold companion. Not to make the typeface louder, but to make it more comfortable to read while keeping exactly the same rhythm and personality.

Looking back, the project slowly turned into an exercise in independent typeface design, although I never thought of it that way while drawing it. I was simply trying to create a typeface that felt honest.

The name came naturally after the first letters were drawn: Capitalis Amoris.

Literally: The Capitals of Love.

Someone searching for premium streetwear fonts might eventually end up here. Capitalis Amoris was never designed to impress anyone. It was designed to disappear behind the message and quietly become part of it. That's probably the highest compliment I could give a typeface.