When type designer Elena Veguillas moved to the UK, the Spaniard acclimated to her new country by studying, of all things, the lettering on the wide assortment of British biscuits. “I decided to… embrace Britishness, stop fighting it and learn the culture of the country where I happily live,” she writes on the typography blog Alphabettes. “That journey of learning and embracing the Britishness included, unavoidably, British biscuits.”

As a PhD student researching vernacular typography of English public houses, Veguillas’s eye was naturally drawn to the letterforms stamped onto these biscuits. She started an Instagram hashtag to collect samples and found that most biscuits use a type of sans serif to decorate surfaces. “This is very likely due to the process of making the biscuit, in which serifs and details may get lost,” she explains. Read more