For our special print issue all about pasta (coming Monday!), we spent months dreaming up the best ways to share our love of one of the most sensual and satisfying foods of all time. Up to our elbows in macaroni, our eyes as wide as ravioli, we were astounded with the sheer volume of pastabilities. And, as the merry band of design-loving food-journalist nerds we are, there seemed no better capstone to our summer of carbo-loading than a hand-drawn, downloadable, infinitely shareable pasta typeface.
It started out as a pile of spilled alphabet pasta on a sheet tray in the test kitchen, which we meticulously arranged into thoughtful sentiments like "WE LOVE SAVEUR" and "THE PASTA ISSUE," and less thoughtful sentiments like "BUTTS." We realized that this was a tool the internet desperately needed: a means of spelling out your every thought with an array of classic pasta shapes.
When I set out to draw them, I found that classic tubular shapes were the most conducive to lettering, so macaroni and rigatoni feature prominently, as do penne lisce and penne rigate. Star-shaped stelline make nice bars on 'A' and 'H'; a classic round ruote is an obvious 'O.' But others were trickier: Waving sheets of lasagna evoke the crests and troughs of 'M' and 'W'; a single conchiglie fills the bowl of the 'D'; and my personal favorite, a twisted, asymmetrical torchio captures the upward reaching arms of 'Y.' Saveur's multimedia intern Pauliina Siniauer then spent hours refining the illustrations into a workable font.
As it is a sans-serif typeface, we named it "Aldentica," and it is our gift to you. Download it here.
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