The genesis for Quarry Digger came from the chance discovery of typography on the engine block of the wrecked digger situated at Te Puna Quarry Park in Tauranga, New Zealand.

As a typographer I’m constantly on the lookout for typography unburdened by design presentation tropes at use in it’s natural environment. The engine block type presented one such opportunity. And, as there was such a limited range of characters (B, -, 3) present on the engine block, the typeface presented a compelling design challenge for first understanding and then extrapolating a design language from a restricted source material.

The ‘B’ & ‘3’ characters of the original typeface contain enough formal clues to develop the uppercase and numerals for a contemporary version of the source typeface. The ‘B’ contains stroke width, curves, glyph width, proportions and overall aesthetic direction for the rest of the uppercase glyphs. For the numerals, the ‘3’ is an interesting glyph as its much more curved than the ‘B’. This enables a looser design language for the numerals than the uppercase. Quarry Diggers ‘B’ and ‘3’ are direct translations from the source material, with all other numerals and uppercase glyphs functioning as extrapolations from these two characters.

Lowercase glyphs were open to greater interpretation. A rough x-height position could be gleaned from the ‘B’, along with stroke width and the overall proportions of the typeface but questions such as double story vs single story ‘a’, descender depth etc were all open ended. For general direction I evaluated the design language of the uppercase and numerals and tried to find a similar language in existing typefaces. The closest was DIN which shared the many of the formal aspects of the original ‘B’.

Like DIN, Quarry Digger has a straight leg of the uppercase R, a double story lowercase a with a straight spur a curled lowercase l. The numerals are however divergent from DIN, especially the 3 which is far less geometric than DIN’s.

Formal language
Quarry Digger’s design language is based on the use of regular stoke widths, open bowls, limited stroke contrast and a lack of organic curves present in the source glyphs. The resulting typeface extrapolates that initial design language across the rest of the character set.

Quarry Digger supports the full Mac Roman and Windows 1252 character sets.

Quarry Digger is released under an OFL license.