Léia is a bold reverse-stress display typeface, featuring sudden and abrupt shifts in contrast at it’s terminals. The typeface was designed with intentionally unbalanced characters, with some letters being much denser than others, yet settling harmoniously within words and sentences. Léia began as a brief graphic exercise developed during the expressive typography workshop taught by Nikolas Type at the design studio Desisto, in Lisbon (April 2025). The initial proposal of the workshop was to design characters based on one’s happiest memory. My first impulse was to base the construction of the first character sketches on the personality of my dog, Léia. What started as an attempt to capture the clumsy and goofy personality of a 30kg Labrador turned into an experimental graphic exercise in typographic contrast.