Practical. Impractical. Experimental. Expressive.
We saw a lot of type that we loved in 2020—and throughout the year, as always, we catalogued it, notably in our Type Tuesday column.
As we head into 2021, we’ve rounded up 25 of our favorite faces—a highly subjective list, as all such lists are, given structure by alphabetical order. (Speaking of subjectivity: As for PRINT’s own awesome typeface, Role—we’d have featured it, had it not been released in 2019.)
Herewith: 25 of our favorites new typefaces from 2020. (And hey: If you forgot to buy a little something for the designer in your life this holiday season, it’s worth mentioning that fonts are a fantastic gift, and require no shipping …)
Apothicaire
Argentinian foundry Sudtipos routinely turns out top-notch type—and their latest release, Apothicaire, is indeed just the medicine we need for the winter blues.
While the name may be French for “apothecary,” Alejandro Paul and his team found inspiration in an antique German design dating back to the late 19th century.
Spanning three widths and five weights, the resulting typeface maintains unexpected quirks and delights and is capable of a wide range of expressions.
Moreover, as Sudtipos details, “An elegant small caps set, a variety of ball terminals and delicate swashes, as well as the possibility to choose from many alternates are also included in the OpenType features.”
To bring a fitting set of specimens to life, Sudtipos turned to Lucila Perini Studio, whose work you can see below.
Atkinson Hyperlegible
The coronavirus pandemic is clearly at the forefront of all of our minds—but there are countless other healthcare puzzles going on at any given time around the world. One is the low-vision paradox: Despite a decrease in blindness worldwide, people are now living long enough to lose their vision.
So what does that mean for printed materials—and how can designers create fonts that are easily read by the growing population of low-vision consumers?
Enter Atkinson Hyperlegible.
Applied Design Works in New York City partnered up with the Braille Institute to develop this easy-to-read typeface named after the institute’s founder, Robert J. Atkinson.
“People may be surprised that the vast majority of the students who come to Braille Institute have some degree of vision,” Sandy Shin, the institute’s vice president for marketing and communications, told All About Vision. “They’re not 100% blind.” Meaning a majority of Braille Institute clients also don’t rely on the dot-based language.
For years now, it seemed the only solution for low-vision clients and printed materials was magnification. But with its careful design, Atkinson Hyperlegible is making a major impact.
According to the Braille Institute’s website, “For low-vision readers, certain letters and numbers can be hard to distinguish from one another. … Atkinson Hyperlegible differentiates common misinterpreted letters and numbers using various design techniques.” By way of recognizable footprints and exaggerated forms, this new typeface is already making a difference and bringing home accolades, including Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award.
The face—a traditional grotesque sans serif at its core—is free to download and comes with four fonts in two weights, accents supporting 27 languages, and 1,340 glyphs. Visit the Braille Institute’s website to learn more, and download Atkinson Hyperlegible here.
BC Retroduktor
Viktor Mizera’s BC Retroduktor is a typeface rooted in a time and place—in more ways than one.
First, it celebrates Akihiko Seki’s Akilines, originally released in the early 1970s. Though there have been different reissues over the years, Briefcase Type Foundry’s BC Retroduktor involves more than 100 masters, producing 24 static fonts and four variable fonts.
And then there’s the heavy influence of the multisensory disco scene of the day. After the introduction of smoke machines, lasers and 3D lighting brought clubs to a whole new level—and the rigs eventually became automated. As the foundry notes, “these movements—awkward, not exactly graceful, but still quite precise—are the ones Retroduktor copies in its morphology.”
Moreover:
The disco scene at the time had become a safe space where the gay community could find a sense of self-confidence. It was also a platform for a new sexual liberation. Gloria Gaynor’s megahit ‘I Will Survive’ was both an expression of female power and an anthem of the gay scene in 1978. It was music that worked in the clubs, but to a certain extent it also worked in broad daylight. Both metaphorically and literally. Because the lights didn’
t slice and blink into one’s eyes, it did not dazzle, but drew visitors through the room. It helped them. Figuratively speaking, it showed the way through the darkness—through all the inner confusion—and it could be followed.
The foundry notes that the typeface is an ideal fit for motion and advertising—and the specimens below indeed back that up.
Case
As Fontwerk puts it: “‘The Curious Case of Erik Spiekermann,’ ‘For lowercase, uppercase, for every case’ … There are puns aplenty for a typeface with this particular name. But we’ll spare you any more and concentrate on the facts.”
Those facts: Spiekermann, working in collaboration with Anja Meiners and Ralph du Carrois, has developed a Neo-Grotesque in three optical sizes. The core family is ideal for logos and display text; the Text family is perfectly crafted for, well, text; and the Micro family offers readability of all things diminutive. The latter two feature a higher x-height, alongside more open shapes; for max readability, Micro also offers traits that make characters more easily distinguishable, and enhanced contrast at the joints of stems and bows.
The facts aside: Spiekermann, Meiners and du Carrois have sat through their fair share of briefings in which clients request their very own Helvetica or Univers. Case is, perhaps, a beautifully nuanced reply.
As Fontwerk writes, “They left out everything that they felt was unnecessary in the world’s most popular typeface genre, but they made sure to keep all the best bits. Building on the concentrate of the best bits, they added new ideas and conceptual solutions for a modern static grotesque. The result is the missing element in an otherwise strained and bloated genre: a typeface whose clear basic personality looks familiar and creates trust, but at the same time is novel and individual and is therefore perfect for strong brand-building. An ideal font for complex branding projects born out of years of working on such complex branding projects.”
Cesium
Hoefler&Co is known for consistently producing outstanding typefaces—but one of our favorite parts of any release from the foundry is the way Hoefler tells a type tale.
It’s a seemingly Herculean job to take months (if not years) of work and distill them into a paragraph or two that not only describes the typeface and its possible applications, but speaks to its inspiration, backstory and perhaps even the psychology behind it. When executed well, it can create a symbiosis that deepens the entire experience.
Take Hoefler&Co’s new release, Cesium.
“Cesium is a chemical element, one of only five metals that’s liquid at room temperature,” Jonathan Hoefler writes. “Resembling quicksilver, cesium is typically stored in a glass ampule, where the tension between a sturdy outer vessel and its volatile contents is scintillating. The Cesium typeface hopes to capture this quality, its bright and insistent inline restrained by a strong and sinuous container.”
The face is an inline descendent of Hoefler&Co’s Vitesse—but as Hoefler describes, infusing the inline involved renovating each and every character, from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ to the period and the space, resulting in a design that can be equally at home in athletic applications as it can in a magazine spread or anywhere from “hardware stores to Hollywood.”
The foundry calls special attention to the impact that spacing has on Cesium’s personality: The tighter the leading and tracking, the more the sport and tech flavor. The greater the letterspacing, the more literary associations develop. (To that end, Hoefler&Co offers its perpetually useful “How to Use” page.)
The end result is a versatile, expressive display face that—giving Hoefler the last word—was difficult to adapt and execute, but “its puzzles were immensely satisfying to solve.”
“Cesium is one of only three H&Co typefaces whose name comes from the periodic table, a distinction it shares with Mercury and Tungsten. At a time when I considered a more sci-fi name for the typeface, I learned that these three elements have an unusual connection: They’re used together in the propulsion system of NASA’s Deep Space 1, the first interplanetary spacecraft powered by an ion drive. I found the association compelling, and adopted the name at once, with the hope that designers might employ the typeface in the same spirit of discovery, optimism and invention.”
Confitería
This typeface was designed by Sudtipos’ Julieta Ulanovsky, in collaboration with Sol Matas.
As Ulanovsky says, “Confi
tería is the Spanish word for a shop where sweets and chocolates are made and sold, which sometimes has a tea room. … There is one iconic confitería in Buenos Aires that I love more than the rest because, some 60 years ago, it put up its marvelous sign and never took it down. It’s big. Very big. And the lettering in its name is written in a timelessly beautiful vertical script—the most attractive I have ever seen.”
The 18 styles of Confitería pay tribute to that sign with a retro aesthetic and smooth strokes that would indeed find a fitting home in a restaurant or sweet shop.
Dark Mode
Dalton Maag’s new typeface is, above all, about legibility—regardless of whether the proverbial lights are on or off.
The increased prevalence of “dark modes” on the web and devices has caused a typographic problem: Owing to optical illusion, white text on a black background looks bulkier than its inverse. The result is often a hierarchy problem … and the solution is the typeface Dark Mode, billed as the first of its kind.
Matt Burvill’s typeface offers two variants for each of its eight weights—aptly dubbed “DarkmodeOn” and “DarkmodeOff.”
“The optical adjustment is surprisingly large, but is imperceptible to readers, aiming to help the designer properly present their intention while improving legibility and user experience,” Dalton Maag writes. “The proportions and widths remain the same between the two modes, preventing text reflow and removing the need for layout adjustments between modes.”
The family includes a variable font file as well, operating at a reduced size to expedite loading times, while giving users the ability to alter the dark mode axis for custom applications.
All told, it’s an extremely forward-thinking design—and like smart lighting in our homes, might just be the wave of the future.
Degular
Last year, James Edmondson of OH no Type Company asked his Twitter followers: What’s the best—and worst—thing about OH no?
One answer to the latter haunted him for months:
“It would be great to be able to use an Ohno font more than once.”
With Edmondson’s signature humor, the winding path that led to his new face, Degular, is explored in depth here—but the key takeaway is that he indeed walked away with a workhouse that can be used more than once. (Some might even say more, given Degular’s 42 styles.)
The development was not without its surprises.
“When I began finishing up the work on these fonts, and showing them to my friends, their reaction was not at all what I had anticipated. They were saying things like, ‘Wild,’ and, ‘I can totally see your hand in this.’ In an effort to make something super bland and devoid of emotion, I had completely failed.”
As far as failures go, this is one we’re all about.
Dilemma
Alejandro Paul’s Dilemma from Sudtipos draws inspiration from Peignot Fonderie’s Polyphème, Cyclopéen and Extra Condensé designs from the dawn of the 20th century.
“From these initial points of reference, Sudtipos went further and reimagined these projects for an actual use by blending them into a unique and complex type system. Dilemma is defined as ‘a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives’ … and that is exactly how we designed this font. We created a workhorse system where each style functioned well alone but would be more powerful when working as a team, pairing the sans styles with the serifs.”
The resulting typeface comes in 42 styles, with three widths and seven weights in both sans and serif.
Enorme
Dubbed “a personal take on modular typefaces,” DSType’s Enorme draws inspirat
ion from Russian Constructivism in the most modern of ways.
As the foundry writes, “At first glance it will look like a plain monospaced typeface, however that couldn’t be further from the truth. With over 3,000 glyphs, all easily accessible through a simple set of opentype features, this typeface quickly reveals itself as more of a typographic playground.”
Typographic playground, indeed—with shape-shifting rounded and square forms that can be stretched to the bounds of legibility and back on both axes, Pedro Leal and Dino dos Santos’ Enorme is a delightful way to do some design frolicking.
Futura Now
Wes Anderson films. Field Notes journals. The U.S. plaque on the moon.
Futura is iconic.
But that doesn’t mean it’s always served up at its best.
A few years ago, Monotype Creative Type Director Steve Matteson gave a talk about the origins of Futura, and he wanted to create an accompanying keepsake to leave his audience with. So he locked up some metal type and letterpressed one.
When he did, the typeface came alive in all new ways: Gone was the coldness he had long felt was imbued in the design, and instead he found an all-new rhythm, balance and readability.
Matteson wanted to bring that feeling back to modern Futura—and today, with the launch of Futura Now, he, Terrance Weinzierl and Juan Villanueva have.
The problem with previous digital offerings of Paul Renner’s 1927 design is that they essentially were copies of copies of copies—and from medium to medium, things became lost. With the new release, Monotype sought to restore the original character of the face, while expanding in organic directions.
All told, Futura Now encompasses 102 styles, 89 languages, 600 characters, new weights, decorative variants, and even a variable font.
“It brings some much-needed humanity back to the world of geometric sans serifs,” Matteson details. “Despite its reputation as the ultimate modern typeface, Futura Now is surprisingly warm. It’s just as at home set next to a leafy tree as it is next to a stainless-steel table, because it skillfully navigates the border between super-clean geometry and humanist warmth.”
Gallos
The W Type Foundry is on a self-professed mission to bring uncials back.
To resurrect the scripts—which were popular from the fourth to eighth centuries AD—the Chilean studio is brewing up some typographic alchemy.
As they write, “What comes to your mind if I say Architype, Geometric, Gaelic and Uncial? An impossible combination of features? An unrealistic setup of tastes as weird as your music list? Or some part of a joke told by your favorite comedian? Just chill and stick to the idea that [it’s] possible.”
On paper, the resulting typeface, Gallos, doesn’t seem like it should work. But then you get drawn in by Diego Aravena Silo and Salvador Rodríguez’s distinct ‘a,’ and you realize it does.
The typeface takes the form of two subfamilies: Gallos Uncial and Gallos Architype. Pops of quirk and personality find their way to the fore of the fonts, thanks to an ‘M,’ ’N,’ “W,’ ‘a,’ ‘m,’ ’n,’ ‘r,’ and ‘w’ unique to each.
“The Uncial script aspect [displays] the leaned ‘a’ with a closed bowl, and the classical geometric style [depicts] more conventional uppercase and lowercase letters ‘m’ and ‘n.’ The Architype [subfamily] is inspired by Paul Renner’s Architype model, thus the leaned ‘a’ has an open counter, the ‘r’ is composed by a stem and a dot, and the rest of the mentioned letters were built using square rational features. Both models are connected by classical Uncial features such as the curved stroke ‘e’ and curved shaft ‘t,’ and with Gaelic vibes which can be seen in uppercase and lowercase letters ‘K’ and ‘X.’”
Will it bring uncials back?
… Doubtful.
Still, we’re happy to see the results of the designers’ typographic time travels.
Interlock
Paul McNeil and Hamish Muir’s MuirMcNeil is known for brilliant, eye-catching systemic and algorithmic experiments in design. (Like, say, the time they made 8,000 unique covers for Eye magazine.)
Now they’re back with a new typeface: Interlock, featuring four styles in six weights. Like most of their projects, in addition to just looking plain cool, a significant amount of theory and thought underpins the work.
As MuirMcNeil explains: “In Interlock, the relationship between inked and uninked parts of letters is broken down into even patterns of parallel horizontal or vertical lines. Where traditional type designs are configured in binary contrasts of form and counterform, Interlock’s lines are progressively incremented in weight to provide tonal pattern densities within the body of the type.
“In Interlock, a common grid determines the positioning of all elements with every contour and space aligning precisely. Interlock typefaces are designed to interact in layers with one another and with corresponding sets of rectangular background grids.
“Using page layout, bitmap or vector design software, the user can apply selected styles to letterforms and backgrounds either in precisely interlocking layers or in easily calibrated offsets. Outlines, tints, colors, textures, patterns and transparencies can be implemented as appropriate.”
Read more here.
Lyon Arabic
Lyon has long been a mainstay of Commercial Type’s stable—and now it has an Arabic counterpart, expanding its global reach even further.
Kai Bernau designed the original Lyon in 2009 as a riff on Robert Granjon’s serif typefaces from the 16th century. Khajag Apelian and Wael Morcos’ Lyon Arabic is completely redrawn, and the product of two years of work. Their goal: Attaining the immense readability of the original Lyon—which they achieved via typographic inspiration from the calligraphic Islamic script Naskh.
“Like the Latin,” Morcos writes, “the design of the Arabic maintains simplified constructions and embraces straightforward detailing with a visible digital touch, making for a crisp texture and a robust appearance comfortable for reading at small sizes.”
Complementing the typeface is Lyon Arabic slanted, a redrawn variant inspired by the fluidity and angles of the Persian and Urdu Nastaliq, building “on the long tradition of using calligraphic variants to bring multiple levels of hierarchy in written and printed manuscripts.”
All told, the typefaces do the original Lyon justice—and maintain their own sense of personality and perspective in the process.
“Both cuts are expressions of one design concept mixing tradition and innovation with the ultimate goal to enrich the Arabic typographic palette,” Morcos writes.
Next up: A display version of Lyon Arabic in early 2021. Stay tuned.
Malice Stencil
Sure, a typeface design should stand on its own.
But when a face is accompanied by the honest story of its development, with all the typically unspoken brain-grating quandaries in between, you’re left with a deeper appreciation for the tools we so often take for granted in the trade—and the creative struggles inherent to them, bearing lessons all their own.
Scott Biersack’s Malice Stencil began life as a blackletter logotype for his studio website, youbringfire. In 2018, Andrew Fairclough of True Grit Texture Supply contacted Biersack about creating an exclusive typeface, and the two agreed to build upon the youbringfire work, which has even deeper roots in Biersack’s studies at Type@Cooper.
As Biersack details, “The goal of Malice was to create something very true to the pen/brush and the motions of my (left-handed) calligraphy.”
The full story of the typeface is well-worth a read here. Suffice to say, Biersack spent swaths of time working on Malice intermittently. He got stuck—“nearly all of the capital letterforms gave me grief.” Lowercase entry strokes were too sharp and light. Glyphs were possessed by odd optical flaws. Friends weighed in. He forged on.
Ultimately, Biersack emerged with a calligraphic blackletter-inspired typeface that is simultaneously traditional and modern, supporting 200+ languages, with a textured companion developed with the support of a custom Robofont extension created by Andy Clymer.
Biersack describes the final product best:
“The undulating stems and soft rounded forms give the stencil a soft touch while still able to throw down in the mosh pits. You can let Malice Clean hold its own while Malice Rough does the heavy lifting on grungy band posters, Halloween decor or occult book covers.”
And the name? It’s inspired by the band B
ad Omens’ song “Malice,” which pairs nicely with the typeface’s “evil” emojis, drawn with the same Zig calligraphy marker at the roots of the font.
Mesclo
The Portugal-based foundry DSType has been around since 1994, and this year its designers released their unique take on a geometric face: Mesclo.
We were quickly seduced by the outline, interline, sideline, borderline and endpoint styles, but stuck around for its personality-laden regular weights that can be deployed across a variety of applications.
“With monolinear appearance, humanistic elements and subtle hints of Art Deco, Mesclo is a timeless typeface with dramatic oblique terminals and a welcoming, friendly roundness,” the foundry writes. “The outstanding dynamic rhythm and legibility of the text contrasts with the inflexible geometry of the unusual complementary caps-only typefaces, specially developed to fulfill and enrich this type family.”
Mesclo was designed by Pedro Leal and Dino dos Santos, and is available here.
Migra Serif
With its policy of giving anyone top-shelf type for personal use—thus allowing designers to become intimately familiar with a font’s full range of capabilities before acquiring it for a commercial project—the Pangram Pangram foundry has always done things differently.
And their latest typeface is delightfully different.
Migra Serif, designed by Valerio Monopoli, is a quirky and beautiful face inspired by the features of migratory birds.
“Its weights span from an austere and elegant light cut to a hawkish and powerful black one,” the foundry writes. “Packed with a set of even more gestural italics and sundry special ligatures, this typeface is guaranteed to add sparkle and grace to any of your designs.”
With eight Roman styles and eight italic styles, alongside 568 glyphs, our hearts are aflutter.
Monte Stella
Monte Stella is a type rooted in time and place: Milan, 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
Dalton Maag Creative Director Riccardo De Franceschi drew inspiration for the face—named after the Italian city’s hill built from World War II debris and signifying renaissance—from Milan’s shop signage and print ephemera.
As Dalton Maag writes, “Monte Stella’s letters are constructed and modular, with the purposeful naivete and imperfect feel of vernacular lettering. Narrow proportions give an economical use of space, and a tight, vertical rhythm. Low contrast improves legibility at small sizes, enhancing versatility. The modularity is balanced by the angular curves of letters such as ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘m’, and ‘n’ pulling away from their stems, energizing the texture and grabbing the reader’s attention.”
The family includes a variable font, and each of Monte Stella’s six weights is accompanied by a “turbo italic” featuring a 20-degree incline. And then there’s the directional arrows and charming icons that complement the face: the snake from Milan’s shield, Milan’s sweet signature Panettone bread, the city’s cathedral, an Aperol spritz, and more.
Bellissimo.
Octothorpe
It started when Jorge Iván’s cousin gifted him a page from the 1978 Manual de Caligrafía, featuring display faces like Astra, Good Vibrations, Piccadilly and, most presciently, Stripes.
Letraset released Tony Wenmann’s multilinear typeface Stripes in 1972—and in Iván’s opinion, no one has produced a worthy revival in the years since.
Entranced by the typeface—“whose peculiarity and innovation lies in the fact that it has alternate versions for most alphabetic characters, allowing them to join with each other, creating a continuous succession of shared parts along the words one wants to give shape to,” as Iván writes—he set out to make that revival.
After pouring over catalog specimens and real-world applications, Iván added the necessary glyphs and characters to modernize the face—including an entire lowercase alphabet—manually drew endless Bezier curves, and emerged with Octothorpe, the latest release by the Argentina-based Pampatype.
Octothorpe features contextual alternates that allow users to decide whether or not to link words; extenders; swashes; extensive diacritic coverage; a currency suite; and some bonus icons to boot.
Hypnotic, colorful and character-driven—and sometimes at play on the border of legibility—you can find it all in action at Pampatype’s delightful Octothorpe microsite here.
Pacaembú
Home to the 1950 World Cup and the 1963 Pan-American Games, the Estádio Pacaembú in São Paulo, Brazil, is an Art Deco masterpiece—and now, it’s being honored with a typeface.
As Naipe Foundry writes, fonts and football are natural bedfellows, with many teams featuring their own custom faces.
“Football—or soccer—is born in Europe, but becomes magical in Brazil, through the feet of legends like Pelé, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo Nazário or Neymar. The Art Deco influence in lettering follows the same trajectory: It’s brought to Brazil by European designers who teach it to the architects and engineers of São Paulo, who in turn give it a new and unique personality that reflects its tropical surroundings.”
To ring in the 80th anniversary of the stadium, Naipe has created the Pacaembú typeface. A family in seven weights supporting 200 languages, the typeface began as a study of the inscribed lettering found throughout the stadium as part of a wayfinding project by Álvaro Franca that was ultimately benched. In 2019, Felipe Casaprima joined Naipe, and the team brought the effort back to life, imbuing caps with heavier proportions and reworking the lowercase while adding bonus characters and icons.
“The result is a font that sits between the 1940s and the 2020s, built to withstand the harsh reading conditions of wayfinding and stand out when set in all caps,” the foundry writes. “Pacaembú carries the flare and style of Art Deco in just the right amount. It won’t overpower any design or shout at the reader, but it always brings a taste of history to the pitch.”
Paper Tiger
If you’re in the market for a set of versatile display faces, Fenotype’s Paper Tiger—“a mesmerizing potpourri of fonts”—offers a varied and veritable design clowder.
“It’s a Victorian Script accompanied by a condensed flared serif in two weights and a chunky sans serif,” Fenotype writes. “Together they make a powerful set for creating logotypes, posters, packaging design, headlines or any display use online or offline.”
Each of the fonts comes in “clean” versions and gritted-up “print” variants, giving users easy exploration of the typeface’s different expressions.
Paper Tiger features contextual alternates and standard ligatures, as well as swash, stylistic and titling alternates.
Check the face out as it purrs to life in Fenotype’s specimens below.
The Q Project
Typeface? Game? Imaginative and perhaps ingenious experiment?
Peter Biľak’s Q Project is many things at once. And while it may be hard to define, it’s relentlessly fun.
“In the world driven by utility and performance, is there room for an open-ended typographic play system that allows [you] to discover something that was not entirely planned, something that the system hoped to allow, but could not guarantee?” Biľak asks in his essay that complements the system, “The Importance of Play.” “At Typotheque we always try to balance our library of very functional typefaces with very inventive typefaces that are fun to use, like Julien, Audree and History. They require some time and some hands-on experimentation, and they may lead you to unexpected outcomes, but of course, that is what play is all about.”
The Q system features six uppercase base fonts and 35 attachments that can be modded as layers, as well as a variable font with a motion axis and three levels of forms. Collectively, they produce an amazing range of typographic possibilities.
“The serifs can be combined to generate unexpected shapes. The letters can be broken into strokes to create entirely new forms. Just as with toys such as LEGO or Merkur, you can build what the designer envisioned, or you can ditch the instructions in favor of free play and create something else entirely.”
We believe the best way to understand the project is indeed to momentarily set the instruction book aside and see it in action.
After you do, head to Typotheque for much more about the ins and outs of the system—which you can get here.
Sisters
Laura Mesegeur’s latest typeface celebrates the creative women of the world.
The family of four dubbed Sisters began as a custom lettering project for an art exhibition identity, and grew from there.
Mesegeur started with the stencil-based Sisters One …
… Added contrast to create Sisters Two …
… Equalized the weights of Sisters Two to create Sisters Three …
… And threw some deco flair into Sisters Two to create Sisters Four.
As Type-Ø-Tones, which Meseguer co-founded, writes, the styles “share foundational principles of construction yet complement each other—as sisters do—by celebrating their differences.”
Check out the display family in action below with Gerard Joan’s specimens, featuring text by Tamye Riggs.
Sombra
Sombra is a typeface that merits a closer look—and one that fully blossoms when you give it one. As the seven weights increase, the delicate Sombra Light gives way to Sombra Poster, where some of the face’s most colorful characters flourish in the form of robust terminals, hairline punctuation and more.
As the German foundry TypeMates details, Sombra “combines geometric structure with leafy, sharply swelling strokes and exaggerated incisions. … Somewhere between buildings and botany, Sombra finds balance in contrasts.”
A typeface that would indeed look good everywhere from packaging to editorial applications, Paul Eslage’s design also features 680 glyphs in each style.
Stapel
Meet Stapel—a sharp new contemporary trio of subfamilies with seven weights each … and a nice array of possible applications.
Designed by Alexander Lubovenko and released by Paratype, from headlines to text, these specimens show that Stapel would indeed be equally at home on a market report as it would a film title card.
