Choose Love is a bold display typeface created by hand with an ink brayer, with at least three alternates for every letter and a set of ligatures in their own font.
It exists because of a grumpy fictional
A football show about love
During lockdown my girlfriend started binging Ted Lasso because her mates swore it was brilliant. I thought: it's a show about football, what's all the fuss about.
Two episodes in I was still shrugging. By the third I was hooked. It's one of those shows that sneaks up on
What got me was that it isn't really about football at all. It's about people, relationships and love. And then there's Roy Kent — the way he carries himself, the things that come out of his mouth. A diamond in the rough. All that bottled-up aggression footballers carry: on the pitch they let their feet do the talking, off it they're grappling with the same everyday stuff as the rest of us.
I wanted to see if a typeface could hold that. Something warm underneath and rough on the surface.
Creating the letters by hand
The idea arrived as a technique rather than a drawing. What if every glyph was made with an ink brayer?
I took the starting shapes loosely from my earlier font Beautiful Freak, then rolled each letterform onto A3 paper. The brayer leaves a texture you can't fake — ink skipping across the tooth of the paper, thin at the edges, dense where it pools.
Then came the drying. Hundreds of sheets, nowhere to put them. I ended up stringing a washing line across the studio and pegging the alphabet up like laundry.
Scanning and cleaning them up took another week. Fontself did the conversion to a working
Why it's called Choose Love
Ted was never going to get past the lawyers. Roy Kent means nothing to your average joe and might put people off. Diamond Dogs lasted a while, until I noticed it was too long for my preview screens.
Choose Love won on the third or fourth pass. Short, punchy, and it summed the show up.
Like Ted Lasso itself, it isn't everybody's cup of
Three versions
Choose Love ships as three fonts
- SVG — the core font, full colour depth and transparency, with alternates. This is the one with all the grit in it.
- Ligature — the two-letter combinations, kept in their own font so they don't fight the alternates.
- Standard — a plain vector version with alternates and ligatures. One flat colour, but it works everywhere.
One important caveat before you buy. The SVG version uses OpenType-SVG bitmaps, which only work in Photoshop CC2017 and later, Illustrator CC2018 and later, and a handful of native macOS apps. InDesign does not properly support them. Windows users, your letters may not appear when you install the font, but it will still work in the apps above. If any of that is a problem, the Standard version is the safe choice — it's in the same download.
If font formats are confusing, I wrote a plain-English guide: Modern font formats explained.
Using it
Choose Love has so much texture that it wants to be big. Posters, ad campaigns, logos, packaging, t-shirts, social. Set it at headline size, swap the repeating letters for their alternates.
Every licence covers personal and commercial use — if you're not sure which one your project needs, here's how my licences work.
Written by Simon Stratford, type designer and graphic designer. These are my opinions, reached after too little sleep and too much coffee. You can also follow my antics on @itsmesimonok, or leave a comment below. Despite all the opinions, I’m actually quite nice.