Maria Sofia Meirelles

MA Graphic Design and Typography

Maria's interest in art started when she was a kid and would spend a whole day drawing and painting. Having the privilege of living on an island, surrounded by nature, has definitely influenced her work as a designer, and is her main source of inspiration.

Maria was born and raised in the beautiful island of São Miguel in the Azores Archipelago, until she moved to college. She spent three years in the city of Porto doing a degree in Graphic Design. During these three years she collected some of the best memories of her life. Then she moved to the UK to follow her passion for typography and type design.

In her free time Maria loves to do volunteer work, She is currently supporting now-u, Sports Connection Foundation and The United Nations, as a graphic designer. During her Master's she also got involved in several projects with the Students Union and was selected as Volunteer of the Month, and achieved the Gold Community Volunteer Award two years in a row.

Project Info

Azorellj is a modular display typeface, born from the patterns present in the Azorean tiles. This is one of the most distinctive marks of our culture, with the tiles being used as a decorative element. They tell the history and honour the memories of the nation.

The letters follow a geometric grid, composed of squares. The upper case x-height is 7 units, and the lower case is 5, with the ascenders and descender being 2 units, each. To maintain the proportion of the letters, the width varies between 1 and 7 units.

The typeface is composed by 5 different styles, 3 patterns, an outline version and a full version for small text. Each one of the 3 pattern styles is available in 3 different layers, this allows the user to combine the patterns between them. In total there are 27 possible combinations.

The main strength of the typeface is versatility. It can be used in a range of different situation and ways. Some of the possibilities include illustration, overlapping, layer combination, the use of only one pattern version and colour combinations.