“We took some liberties on some parts, and stayed very conservative on other parts,” the firm’s art director Simen Schikulski told Fast Company. “We saw that there was some inconsistencies in the original letters in terms of shapes and sizes–as we expected, since the letters were created for optometrists, not as a typeface.”

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As Fast Company noted, the original set of letters intentionally made it difficult to discern letters like “C” from “O” at the teeny, tiny sizes meant for people with superhuman vision. So in order to make some of these more legible in other applications, ANTI Hamar also designed a number of alternatives.

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Fábio Duarte Martins, a Type Designer who teaches typography at IADE University in Lisbon, worked on the project with Schikulski and his team. One clarification he notes is that the full alphabet in Optician Sans wasn’t intended to expand the character set of the letters used in LogMAR charts, but is rather inspired by them.

“We took the LogMAR optotypes and did what in type design we call ‘optical corrections,’ or small adjustments to make their form aesthetically pleasing,” he told Gizmodo by email. “The optotypes are made to measure visual acuity; so, for example, the equal stroke widths are important to measure how good your eyesight is. We didn’t want to measure anything with Optician Sans. We just wanted a visually pleasing display typeface.”

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Ultimately in making the font freely available, Martins said both he and Schikulski hope that people have as much fun with it as they did.

“We’re actually working on expanding the character set to support more languages,” he said, “so we’re just sharing something we think is nice with the world.”

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[Fast Company]