In reply to Where's Hrant's article on Hague's Olympic font?:
I see the Olympic font as mostly italic in structure, especially the lowercase, but as a result of interpreting normally curved strokes as straight diagonals it introduces a topography of unconventional angles. The really novel aspect of the design is the application of these angles across letters that do not share conventional structural similarities with those in which they originate, which at once makes the design distinctive while giving it strong internal consistency. So, for example, the structure of the uppercase C works as a construction of an open-sided counter shape expressed as a minimal number of straight strokes: you can imagine a conventional italic C superimposed on it and the forms reflecting each other. But then Hague has taken this form and applied it also to the uppercase E, and has echo'd the same diagonals in a different way in the uppercase Z. The modular repetition of the angles gives consistency to the design. I think only a very few of the letters could be described as 'rotalic', e.g. the lowecase s, and in my analysis they're that way because of an approach to representing curves as minimal numbers of straight lines and angles, not due to rotation per se.
