In 2015, New York’s architects, designers and other industry professionals came together for the Heritage Ball, the annual black tie gala to benefit the AIA New York Chapter and the Center for Architecture. Pentagram’s Natasha Jen and her team designed the graphics for the event, which featured custom typography that celebrated the adaptable quality of architecture.

The designers created a playful typographic system based on the idea of reconfiguration of space—similar to the nature of architecture itself. Expanding and contracting, the typography visually echoes the way buildings and structures adapt to fill available area, especially in cities and urban environments. The custom typeface, named Herita-Geo by the designers, is composed of letterforms that horizontally scale between regular and extended widths of the font, which are used all at once. The approach dynamically comes to life in animations where the letters squeeze in or stretch out as needed to fill the space. A double line was used to emphasize the architectural quality of the typeface, while the color blue references blueprint sheets.