Chappell Longhand

Warner Chappell Music is the global music publishing company of Warner Music Group. Its catalog is home to the work of over 70,000 songwriters, composers, and producers, including Lizzo, Gucci Mane, Frank Ocean, Bruno Mars, Radiohead, Madonna, Led Zeppelin, Kacey Musgraves, Katy Perry, Dr. Dre, Talking Heads, Ray Charles, Stephen Sondheim, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and countless other legendary artists. Pentagram created a new visual identity for the company, which helped marked the beginning of a new era in its over-200-year history.

The importance that WCM places on the craft of songwriting became a key point of inspiration for a new logotype. The warm, irregular, handwritten letterforms suggest a moment of creativity—a spark of an idea that needs to be written down in a hurry. We worked closely with the team at Pentagram to expand these concepts into a full custom typeface, called Chappell Longhand, which the company can use to seamlessly bring the energetic feel of scribbled notes to a variety of applications and touch points.

To create a typographic texture that feels human, Chappell Longhand smartly swaps in alternate forms of each character as the user types. Some letters connect, while others do not, and the occasional swash t adds a human flourish, like a dash of a personal style at the end of a signature. OpenType features allow the user to manually adjust the alternates as well.

Chappell Longhand also supports languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. Maria Doreuli of Contrast Foundry joined our team to lend her expertise. In addition to making sure the glyphs and script connections are natural and legible, Maria also offered crucial feedback on the feel of each glyph, ensuring that the forms match the Latin in their quickness and fluidity.

Cyrillic Consulting: Maria Doreuli