Somewhere in the night, above the branches Restless with tongues of leaves over the square, Where you and I and all The false play-acting puppets are, In a high room, hidden in the darkness, There lies your heart, the truly good, swathed in the flesh, where all roses unfold.
Ceraph’s name combines seraph, serif and cera, from ceramic: the seraphim, the highest order of angels, whose name means “the burning ones”; the flared serifs; and clay, which only becomes ceramic through fire. Its letterforms are built on tensions: roundness against angularity, classical form against contemporary construction, expressiveness against structural rigour. At its heart, it asks how restrained, legible letterforms can register as both language and impression.
The uppercase draws on Roman capitals, above all those of Giovanni Francesco Cresci, the sixteenth-century Vatican scribe who rejected the geometrically constructed capitals of his time and drew his by eye. Ceraph tries to keep that life of the hand in its digital drawings. Certain letterforms look forward to Jakob Erbar’s Feder Grotesk of 1910, whose pen-drawn grotesque anticipated Art Deco. The lowercase is more calligraphic, shaped by Emma’s own practice and by the humanist type of Hermann Zapf.
First sketched in 2018 and designed over five years, Ceraph was released by Sharp Type in 2024. In 2026 it grew into a family of twelve styles, developed with Lucas Sharp, Matthijs Herzberg and Léna Le Pommelet.
I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. I’m not sure if I’m not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self. Sometimes, when I’m actively engaged in life and have as clear a notion of myself as the next man, my mind is beset by a strange feeling of doubt: I begin to wonder if I exist, if I might not be someone else’s dream.
I can imagine, with an almost carnal vividness, that I might be the character of a novel, moving within the reality constructed by a complex narrative, in the long waves of its style. I’ve often noticed that certain fictional characters assume a prominence never attained by the friends and acquaintances who talk and listen to us in visible, real life. And this makes me fantasize about whether everything in the sum total of the world might not be…
ItalicUncial setDiscretionary ligatures
Ashes denote that Fire was
ItalicDiscretionary ligatures
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.
Selected in use
cover of Eye Magazine’s type special issueGhostly International limited edition tees
