The Coins That Became Thorn Serif

This is how I came across these coins I was telling you about.

I was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, and naturally I am quite curious about the city I grew up in.

So, the coat of arms of Sofia was designed by Haralampi Tachev, and in one account he describes it, noting that in one of the upper corners is depicted a woman, the personification of Ulpia Serdica.
Who is Ulpia Serdica, you might ask? It is someone connected to Serdica (the ancient name of Sofia). And, according to Tachev, her portrait in the coat of arms was taken from a coin minted in Serdica a few thousand years ago.

Naturally, I got curious about coin minting, especially since it was minted here. It turns out that in the Roman Empire, many places minted coins, and Serdica was indeed one of them.

Back then, I did not have a typeface in mind, but as a type designer, my attention went straight to the tiny letters.

A quick disclaimer here: in this article, I will show you a few of the Roman coins I mentioned. But keep in mind that these pictures are not the originals. They are based on original coins, but several factors made it difficult to show them here — mainly the lack of copyright-free images and, at the same time, the need for higher resolution to show the details I am talking about. For this reason, I used AI to “upscale” the coins, so keep that in mind. But if you are curious, feel free to search more online (I promise the coins are much more interesting than one might think).

Around this time, I first started to question myself: is it possible to make a whole typeface based on these letters? To answer this question, I began gathering more and more references. My main interest was in coins minted in Serdica, but I also expanded the overview to include other coins from across the Roman Empire. They had many similarities but also some differences. Whether the differences are based on different “artistic” views, damage over time, other teachings, or anything else, I cannot say, and, to tell you the truth, not much written evidence is still available. 

Okay, so, the text on the coins is written in two scripts: Latin and Greek. Why? Because these were the official scripts used in the Roman Empire at this period.

When designing a typeface, you establish rules, such as guidelines, that will work for the whole system.

And let’s get into some details, as some particular elements appear again and again on each letter.

• They are all in uppercase letters (but a modern typeface needs a full case)

• All letters are very strong and masculine
• They all have the pointy, pronounced serifs I told you about. Some of these serifs are even “double.”
• Most letters have very little contrast between the horizontal and vertical stems.

A side note here, which I find to be very interesting: I am sure that everyone interested in type in general is familiar with Capitalis Monumentalis, and it is impossible to mention “Roman letters” without an image of the Roman stone pillars coming to mind.

That is why it was so strange how different the letters on the coins were compared directly with those carved on the stones.

A few words about Capitalis Monumentalis: it is much more elegant. The proportions of each letter are carefully measured and diverge greatly from letter to letter, but we consider these classical proportions very balanced for the eye. On the coins, the letters often appear to be quite opposite: most are roughly the same width. The serifs on the Capitals are thin and precise; on the coins, the serifs are pointy, big, sometimes even disproportionate. 

Maybe the differences are due to the technique; maybe they are due to the rush with which the coins were made, as the volume of the coins was much greater than that of the inscriptions on the stone.

I can’t tell; I’m guessing.

By the time I started designing Thorn Serif, it was more than obvious to me that it would be nearly impossible to make a true revival typeface. There were many differences in the coins, and even if I followed a particular coin, it would not work in a “real” digital typeface. We still need the lowercase, numbers, extended Latin, Cyrillic, and so much more that a modern font should offer.
So I decided I would rather do my best to capture the “spirit” of the coins and offer my own interpretation. 

And even with the differences, after comparing many coins, I began to see recurring patterns in their forms.

I have already mentioned a few things, such as the similar widths of the letters, the low contrast, and the large, thorny serifs. These were my guidelines.

For me, it did not matter what one specific letter on one specific coin looked like. What mattered as a type designer was to understand the principles and to develop the rest of the glyph case.

So here is how it started: as with any “normal” typeface, we need the basics; in this case I chose to test that construction through three basic kinds of form: straight letters like “H,” diagonal letters like “A” and “V,” and round letters like “O.”

“H” and “O,” I would say, were pretty straightforward with standard proportions (they even looked a bit modern to me), but what was weird was the triangular shape, the “V.”

In the coin references, the diagonal letters often looked as if they had been assembled from separate stems stamped together next to each other, instead of one whole shape. This resulted in the unusual extra serifs on the vertexes and apexes of the letters. I tried to keep this specific construction, and I call it “double serifs.”

Working with the “basic” shapes gave me the fundamentals to continue all the uppercase letters. I also had a few references for additional uppercase Latin letters.

But the problem was that the coins did not give me enough.

I already had a few uppercase Latin letters, and I could use some Greek letters, but that was all. I had no lowercase letters, no Cyrillic, no numbers or punctuation. I had to deduce and use my imagination to figure out what they would all have looked like.

So, straight into the lowercase.
All of these glyphs are just what I picture they might have looked like, and I tried my best to translate the same principles from the uppercase to the lowercase.

For example: this same extra serif on the “V” and “A” meant that the typeface will overall need more serifs than the usual. As a rule, if a letter can have a strong serif, I should allow it.

So the ascenders of letters like “d” and “h” also got these extra “double serifs” that I was talking about. Usually, it is much more common when these same letters have only one serif on one side, not two.

Another thing I thought was important is the endings of letters like “S” and “C”: they have very strong, spiky ends on both sides. The same construction was used for the lowercase letters like “e” and “a.”

And also, keeping in mind that it seems as if each stem was constructed by separate shapes, not one that is connected, that meant that the connections should not be smooth, but instead abruptly combined one stem into the other (see “n” and “d”).

Since I was born in Sofia, I felt that Thorn Serif also needed Cyrillic, the alphabet used here today.

But Cyrillic developed in the ninth and tenth centuries, long after these coins were minted, so they could not provide me with a historical model of Cyrillic. But Cyrillic shares many structural features with both Latin and Greek, which gave me a way to imagine how Thorn’s construction principles might have appeared in Cyrillic if the script had existed in that period.

And even if I had not seen every letter in the world, I had seen enough to understand the idea.

First, I extended the Cyrillic alphabet with letters that already appeared in the other scripts, such as А, Е, К, М, О, and Т. And from there, you can construct the letters that are unique to Cyrillic, such as Б and Ж, and many others if you imagine how they would have looked.

One example: the letter Ж. It is unique to Cyrillic and is not found in other scripts like Latin or Greek. I start its construction using the letter K as a base. By mirroring a K and overlapping it with a second K on the main vertical stem, we form the basic skeleton. From there, we adjust it optically. Because this glyph has more strokes than K, we thin the strokes slightly; otherwise, they appear visually heavier than other letters. And then you just need to shrink the width a bit; otherwise, the letter would appear way too wide.

One more example: Cyrillic letter Б. Here, we reuse existing elements from the Latin alphabet to assemble the basic skeleton, then refine the letter to make it optically correct.

The diagram above will give you a better understanding of what I am talking about.

At this stage, the font family has grown to its almost full glyph set, and now I am going to tell you about one of its OpenType features, more precisely, a stylistic set. Can this really be an interesting thing, you might wonder. Well, I think it is, but I am a type designer after all, so you will be the judge.

So, my friends all know that I am obsessed with letters. And one day, a friend of mine came by with a “treasure” they had found at the flea market: an old folder containing a collection of individual papers, printed in black and white, documenting medieval inscriptions.

This has literally nothing to do with Roman letters, but funny enough, the letters look very much like the actual coin inscription. It is a completely different time period and purpose, but for some reason they reminded me of Thorn Serif.

At first, I thought this might be the missing reference for the Cyrillic. On that note, I have been looking at medieval coins for the Cyrillic letters. But in terms of style, they have nothing to do with the Roman coins. These papers, on the other hand, had similar letter proportions, similar serifs, and similar contrast. I thought that this fit perfectly. So I made the Cyrillic using these references.

But a few months later, I thought of another thing: why make the Cyrillic different from the Latin, and deprecate the Latin of these, in my opinion, pretty interesting forms? That was the moment the idea came to mind: the stylistic alternates will be the ones that use the old Bulgarian medieval manuscript. This way, the typeface will have elements not only from Sofia’s Roman past, but also from the medieval period.

I will conclude this article with a few final words: Thorn Serif carries the spirit and shape of the Roman coins. I took it as a little challenge to see whether it was possible to work with something ancient and adapt it for the modern digital world. In my opinion, it worked.

But there is something more important to me than that: not only Sofia, but so many places all around the world have so much more to show from their ancient past. And it is so easy to pass these ancient ruins, like they are just stones sitting there for eternity, without even thinking about it.

But it can be different if you just let the past tell its story. This time I have decided to stay and “listen” to these tiny, thorny letters.
What would you allow the past to tell you?

Best,
Stan