In June 2012 Vienna International Airport opened a new terminal which more than doubled the size of the airport. The new terminal was designed by architectural venture Itten-Brechbühl/Baumschlager-Eberle, with signage by Intégral Ruedi Baur. Typotheque developed a custom version of Fedra Sans for the Airport.

Ruedi Baur and his team worked for 8 years on the signage design, which includes a stunning 50-meter long wall where illuminated LED characters inform visitors of approaching planes. Eva Kubinyi was the project manager of the signage project. David Esser designed the special pictograms and pixel version of Fedra Sans.

All photos courtesy of Intégral Ruedi Baur Paris.

We are pleased to introduce Irma Screen.

Irma Screen is designed to work equally well on paper and the computer screen. It is available in TrueType format only and has been specially optimised for exceptional readability on laptops, desktops, mobile devices and other digital displays.

This small family of two weights combines art, craft and engineering to achieve crystal-clear results using a sophisticated system of hinting instructions (adjustments that modify the fonts at screen resolutions for maximum legibility). Irma Screen has been hinted both for the ClearType and Grey-Scale rasterisers, ensuring that the fonts work well on both LCD and CRT monitors.

All 1326 glyphs in Irma Screen Pro were hinted, so Russian and Greek (and any of its other supported languages) look as good as English.

Hinting Type
Following our new system for identifying hinting type, Irma Screen has been hinted in both directions (Horizontal & Vertical) for the Grey-scale and ClearType rendering.

 

Irma Screen was meticulously hand-hinted by Ivo Biľak. For more information about hinting read this article.

Irma Screen rendered in Notepad on Windows XP, with default settings, in 8 and 10 pt.

Unhinted version of Irma Screen, at 8 ppem, magnified to 200%

Hinted version of Irma Screen, at 8 ppem, magnified to 200%

Complete character set of Irma Screen, rendered under ClearType

We at Typotheque care deeply how our fonts render in all media, whether in print or on screen. We started working on our first screen font back in 2002, and after we introduced our webfont system in 2009 — which seems like ancient history now — we redoubled our efforts to make sure that our fonts looked great on digital displays. We are continually expanding our collection of lightly hinted display fonts, which work nicely onscreen at larger sizes, and extensively manually-hinted screen fonts, which are meticulously optimised to perform well onscreen at small sizes.

Like all technologies, digital displays and rasterisers (the software that drives displays) are continually changing. This makes hinting trickier, as different rasterisers require different hinting instructions. For example Verdana, introduced in 1992, was long considered the hinted font par excellence, but its 20-year old instructions produce suboptimal results under the latest Windows rasteriser. Furthermore, some hinting software allows either ClearType hinting (horizontal only) or greyscale hinting (both horizontal and vertical hinting), but not both. This means that the font cannot be displayed optimally on all devices; font designers have to decide which rasterisers to support, graphic designers who use the font have to choose which systems to design for (if they even know what kind of hinting the font uses), and end users have to have the right equipment, otherwise the font may not perform well, especially at smaller sizes. This is a technical nightmare, one of the reasons that so very few fonts are hinted.

(Incidentally, Typotheque uses a customised version of VTT which supports multiple hinting instruction sets. This results in smarter fonts that look great with both greyscale and ClearType rasterisers.)

To help designers and end users, we are proposing standardised icons to identify the hinting methods used for each font:

This icon indicates that the font was hinted both horizontally
and vertically for black-and-white rendering.

This icon indicates that the font was hinted both horizontally
and vertically for greyscale rendering.

This icon indicates that the font was hinted only vertically
for ClearType rendering.

Download optimised bitmap icons in 16, 24 and 32 pixels, or vector version.

We welcome other designers and type foundries to download and use these icons, which were designed by Ondrej Jób, and are provided for free under a CC-0 licence.

We constantly monitor the performance of our webfont service and work on ways make it faster and more efficient. Today we are announcing technical changes that you can take advantage of to get significantly improved webfont serving.

Longer cache for fonts and CSS files

We have extended cache durations: font files now remain in cache for one week, and CSS files are cached for 5 minutes. Practically speaking, this means that font data is loaded significantly faster, while changes in CSS can be still visible in 5 minutes. Returning visitors and visitors who visit multiple pages will experience faster loading times, as the fonts don’t need to be requested from the server, but are loaded from browser’s cache. This should also reduce webfont data transfer, effectively making the service cheaper.

HTTP and HTTPS

When saving a webfont project, users can choose between the standard font serving method and SSL security for HTTPS sites. We recommend using HTTP by default, since loading HTTPS is a little slower. Because of the SSL certificates, our HTTPS webfonts are available from a different domain.

No TTF files

All modern browsers now use WOFF fonts, so we are retiring our raw TrueType files, serving WOFF font files instead whenever possible. We’ve also retired SVG fonts, but continue to serve EOT files for older versions of Internet Explorer.

What to do

To take advantage of these improvements you will need to save the webfont project again. This will generate a new CSS, so you will need to use it to update your website.

The old method of serving the fonts is using this URL for serving the webfonts:

http://wf.typotheque.com/WF-XXXXXX-XXXXXX.css"

In the new method the URL is different:

http://fonts.typotheque.com/WF-XXXXXX-XXXXXX.css"

We are presently maintaining the old method of service, so you can make the change anytime, but we recommend that you try out the update. You will be pleasantly surprised.

Animation: Thibault de Fournas & Christopher Wilson, Screenplay: Peter Bilak, Voiceover: Harvey Gold, Music: Nicolas Jaar.

Karloff explores the idea of irreconcilable differences, how two extremes could be combined into a coherent whole.

At the start we looked at the high-contrast Didone typefaces which are considered by many as some of the most beautiful in existence, and the eccentric ‘Italian’, reversed-contrast typeface was designed to deliberately attract readers’ attention by defying their expectations. No other style in the history of typography has provoked such negative reactions as the Italian.

Karloff, the result of this project, connects the high contrast Modern type of Bodoni and Didot with the monstrous Italians. The difference between the attractive and repulsive forms lies in a single design parameter, the contrast between the thick and the thin.

Having designed two diametrically opposite versions, we undertook a genetic experiment with the offspring of the beauty and the beast, interpolation of the two extremes, which produced a surprisingly neutral low contrast version.

Read more about the concept in the article Beauty & Ugliness in Type Design.

Karloff Positive

Karloff Negative

Karloff Neutral

For the past eight months we have worked on a concept of a new magazine. We are pleased to announce it now.

Works That Work is conceived as a magazine that looks beyond mere portfolios, concerning itself with the conditions and contexts of design in a wider sense, celebrating the manifestations of unexpected creativity. Works That Work will be a twice-yearly, internationally distributed periodical, detached from the artists’ egos, a practical, understandable, jargon-free publication. A kind of National Geographic of design.

At a time when most print magazines are reducing their print schedules, shrinking in size and readership, or closing down entirely, we propose a new print magazine and accompanying website fully integrated with the physical edition of the magazine. The readers of the magazine will be able to read it on paper, on computer, or on their mobile devices, with all content accessible at all times.

The magazine contains original essays, stories and images that celebrate simplicity, presenting works that change the way you perceive them. The first issue will include contributions about urinals at Amsterdam airport (whose simplicity can save up to 80% in spillage and cleaning costs), the importance of beauty in design, article on dabbawallas — ingenious Mumbai’s homemade food distribution, and what role a translator has in the understanding of a literary author published in a foreign language (among other things). We have enough material to fill three issues, and are working on more with a league of inspiring contributors to make each issue strong and impactful.

Help Us

We’d like to say that we are independent magazine, but in reality we are fully dependent on you, the readers. Go to our new site, and consider supporting us.

Irma Text Narrow is a space saving addition to Irma type system. While the original Irma Text has generous proportions, the Narrow version is 20% more condensed, yet still preserving the Irma’s DNA.

Irma Text is a fluid Sans-serif typeface which balances two contradictory construction principles. While it has inherited the geometric structure of the previously-published Irma Display typefaces, it is also inspired by the principles of drawing and cursive writing. Although combining geometric and handwritten models may seem paradoxical at first sight, this synthesis of two different construction principles lends the typeface its unique, dynamic character. Irma Text is sophisticated and personal, yet composed and assured.

As most of Typotheque fonts, Irma Text Narrow also supports Greek and Cyrillic.

360 is a new Dutch magazine that gathers a wide selection of articles from over 800 reputable foreign periodicals and translates them into Dutch. Every two weeks its readers get a fresh compilation of material not only from such well-known newspapers as The New York Times, Le Monde and The Economist, but also from mainstream magazines in Brazil, China, Iran, or Sudan.

As is the trend these days, 360 is available both in a paper edition and through a paid iPad app, and most of the content is also available on the magazine’s website. Publisher Katrien Gottlieb worked with Amsterdam graphic design studio Dog and Pony to create a visual identity that would be consistent across the magazine’s print and digital environments.

Art Director Bart Heldeman explained why he chose Fedra Serif and Fedra Sans for the project: ‘The magazine publishes long, complex stories, so we needed a typeface with excellent readability at small sizes. We were looking for a font with a large x-height and short ascenders and descenders, and we needed both serif and sans serif versions. We wanted a typeface that had not just a wide range of characters, but also a personality. Something serious, modern and sophisticated. These criteria narrowed down our choice by about 90%. In the end there was only one typeface family that distinguished itself from the rest: Typotheque’s Fedra. It's a beautiful typeface with a wide range of characters and possibilities. The large range of weights (in Serif as well as Sans), the distinctive yet harmonious difference between roman and italic, it all fit seamlessly into our idea of what 360’s identity should be.’

In October 2012, after a year of preparation, we launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new design magazine, Works That Work. We were asking our potential readers whether there was room on the market for a periodical aimed not only at designers in particular, but at the public in general, and we were letting them answer with their wallets. The response was overwhelming: we met our target in less than a week, and by the time we published the magazine over a thousand supporters had contributed over €30.000 giving us enough funds to cover the costs of the first issue and build our own platform for print and digital publishing.

For us, it was tremendously exciting to know that those readers were out there. We started Works That Work because we ourselves are fascinated by how, why and what people create. We wanted articles that would expand our minds with new ideas, inspiring us by example and surprising us with diversity. It’s nice to know that we are not alone! More about our goals in the editorial.

Works That Work doesn’t celebrate individual creators, as much as investigate the creative process. It prefers the practical to the theoretical, exploring unexpected manifestations of creativity in the everyday world around us and seeking to demystify the design process. We publish original, in-depth essays and stories on subjects connected with design, presenting projects that challenge and change the way you perceive them.

In that same spirit, we want to reinvent publication distribution. Instead of feeding an army of middlemen, we would like to deepen our relationships with our readers and make them partners in this enterprise. We call this social distribution. We have a number of magazine hubs where readers can pick up copies, bring them to their favourite bookstore, and earn money by doing it. More about the distribution model here.

We'll be publishing the magazine twice a year, in print and electronic editions. We don’t know where this project will lead us, but we are very much looking forward to the trip.

Official Press Release, PDF file

Buy single copies here, or subscribe directly on Works That Work website.

Supernova is a new family that combines the spontaneity of a script typeface with the versatility of multiple weights and cuts.

The development of script typefaces has largely been limited to variations in shape and proportion (and with the advent of OpenType technology, the addition of alternate letterforms). Their application has continued to be primarily linked to their emotional attributes, while roman types predominate in body texts.

Supernova takes a step in a different direction and was conceived as a script typeface family comprised of several weights and cuts, including a versatile, eye-catching display version and a highly legible body-text version with five weights.

The Poster version features expressive, flamboyant shapes, exploring variations in contrast, weight and style. Text version, on the other hand includes more subtle letterforms that could work smoothly within the text flow. Intended for display purposes, Supernova Poster is an extroverted cut. Unlike the text version it contains many alternates per character, two styles of alternate capitals and an expressive ductus.

Read the full article about the process of designing Supernova.

The best work is often the most personal work. Work done not to fulfil somebody’s design brief, but for your own pleasure in your spare time.

Recently we were looking for a carpet for our new house. After shopping online and offline for weeks, we were frustrated that we were unable to find one that would fit. I mentioned it to our good friend Nikola Djurek, who suggested contacting Regeneracija, a Croatian company specialising in the creation of handmade carpets. Seeing their fine work inspired us to create a carpet we really wanted.

The result is a combination of the skills of Regeneracija’s craftsmen and our interest in typography. The carpet features our Irma typeface and its OpenType features translated into textile. The carpet is 170 × 250 cm and made of New Zealand wool.

This particular carpet is ours, but you can now order your own copy through Typotheque. While most design objects and handcrafted artworks are sold at premium prices, we decided for the lowest possible price, covering only the costs of materials and labour. The production cost per square meter is €390, so the carpet in the photo (170 × 250cm) would cost €1657 + shipping costs*. You can specify the size of your carpet (although the proportions of 1:1.47 must be maintained). Delivery time is around 10 weeks. A black & white version is also available.Email us for details.

*Shipping to Germany, for example is about €70 for the transport and customs fees.

Lumin is an extensive type family designed by our longtime collaborator Nikola Djurek and intended especially for editorial use.

The Lumin family includes slab-serif, sans serif, condensed and display typefaces, all of which play with the idea of contradiction. The contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes seems to be quite subtle, evoking the slab serifs of the past century. The stroke connections, however, are sharply chiseled, reminiscent of high-contrast modern types, an effect especially pronounced in the heavier weights. The result is hybrid letterforms that look almost like stencil drawings, yet maintain high legibility at the smallest sizes.

Lumin is a sturdy slab-serif face with large counters and a large x-height. Its serifs are unbracketed and asymmetric, emphasising the rightward flow of reading.

Lumin Sans is a a straight-talking collection of six weights ranging from Hairline to Bold. The simplified letter construction proves distinctive in the heavier styles, where the sharpness of the stroke connection establishes the personality of this typeface.

Lumin Sans Condensed is roughly 30% narrower, a compact typeface that helps designers get the most content into the available space without sacrificing readability.

Lumin Display completes the family’s typographic palette with a headline version of the slab-serif face in three different widths. Its letters are spaced tightly to create convincing blocks of bylines, headers or any short text.

It’s not easy to describe newly-published typefaces before their usefulness has been demonstrated in real world application. Lumin has already been rigorously tested in magazines and newspapers, so you can see for yourself how it performs in these samples:

Communication Arts is the world’s largest magazine for designers, and over its more than 50 years of existence it has kept up closely with the rapidly evolving media of visual communication. It was the first US magazine to be printed using offset lithography, as well as the first major design magazine to have an online presence, and today it is also reaching out through applications and social media. Surprisingly, in its long history CA has only gone through four major redesigns, the most recent of which involved Typotheque’s Greta Sans.

Publisher Patrick Coyne and art director Tricia Seibold needed a typeface that would give them the typographical tools necessary to support an international publication in both print and onscreen applications, but they were also looking for a certain personality. ‘When Patrick first came to me with Greta, I felt like a kid in a candy store,’ says Seibold. ‘It seemed like there were so many possibilities. The font feels modern, sleek and unobtrusive. Our goal at Communication Arts is to make sure the artists we feature take centre stage, so any font we chose had to have just enough style to be distinctive and capture the spirit of our brand without competing with the work we show.’

Patrick and I have always loved the original logo. As Patrick mentioned, one of the problems with our Univers Thin Ultra Condensed logo is that is wasn't particularly scalable. Shown at a small size, it fell apart, and visually became a series of vertical lines. —Tricia Seibold

A major objective for the redesign was to unify the magazine’s design across all platforms. This had been a problem because when CA launched its website, the typefaces it was using for its print version were not available for use on the web, which forced the magazine to fragment its visual identity. And even when webfont systems made it possible to use the print fonts online, Coyne says, their readability on digital displays was a concern. ‘This issue was further complicated as we increased our social media presence and began to explore publishing a tablet version. We have used a modified version of Univers Thin Ultra Condensed as our logotype since 1995, but it becomes illegible when viewed as an icon in Apple’s App Store or on Twitter.’ In addition, Coyne and Seibold needed a font system versatile enough to handle a wide variety of typesetting situations. ‘I was looking,’ says Coyne, ‘for a typeface family with enough text weights between light and bold to adapt to numerous screen and print resolutions while still remaining highly legible, distinctive and not obtrusive. When searching for a complete family range with even greater flexibility than Univers, I found Greta Sans to be the perfect solution.’ Seibold agrees. ‘[Linotype’s Univers] has served us well and did offer some great weight choices, but the weights and widths (not to mention all the glyphs) we have with Greta give us a lot more to play with.’

Seibold calls the redesign ‘a bit of an ongoing undertaking’, and CA’s websites are currently in the process of being converted to Greta Sans, but you can follow their progress at commarts.com.

The lighter and heavier weights of Greta Sans works well in headlines, while the Regular weight is well suited for body text.

Like any brand steward, I’ve never been happy that our printed publication and our website used different typefaces. The use of Web fonts could have finally solved this. —Patrick Coyne

Type surrounds us in a multitude of different forms, not just in books and newspapers, but on signs, television, computer monitors, cellphone displays and tablet screens. New communication technologies are linking people and cultures around the globe, driving a need to design and publish new typefaces at an ever-increasing pace. This is of course a commercial venture, but there is also an element of public service: typefaces preserve language and language preserves culture.

There are seven billion voices in the world, speaking about 7,000 living languages, more than 2,000 of which are in danger of going extinct, taking with them the unique heritage of their cultures. Itelmen, for example, the original language of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, has fewer than 100 native speakers, most of them elderly. Itelmen is written using the Cyrillic alphabet plus the rare character Ӄ.

Given Itelmen’s status as a dying language, it comes as no surprise that out of the perhaps 100,000 commercial fonts in the world, less than dozen of them contain the Ӄ.

It takes over 50,000 working hours to design a typeface such as Greta Sans with the characters needed to support the 86 most common languages that use the Latin alphabet, in the range of styles required for professional-quality layout.

Another 50,000 working hours later, we are releasing a new version that will also support less common Latin-script languages as well as Cyrillic and Greek scripts. It can handle major languages such as Russian and Vietnamese, as well as obscure languages such as Itelmen and even extinct languages such as ancient Greek.

This raises the question of whether it is worth the extra hours to design characters that are so seldom used. Ancient Greek, for example, requires 217 additional characters compared to modern Greek, but printing the original texts of Socrates (or putting them on the web) is impossible without them. Supporting these languages with typefaces designed to produce high-quality text not only on paper, but on today’s digital displays may not be too interesting commercially, but it is an important step in preserving our planet’s cultural heritage.

This text has originally been written for the Financial Times Magazine, July 2013.

Lava was originally designed for Works That Work magazine, but far transcends its original application. It’s a no-nonsense workhorse typeface that can handle large quantities of text with ease. It’s legible and harmonious at small sizes, sophisticated and elegant at large sizes.

Since the magazine exists both in print and on screen, Lava was designed to perform optimally in both high- and low- resolution environments. Lava looks closely at system fonts such as Times and Georgia and aspires to work on screen as well as they do. In print, Lava delivers something that user interface fonts usually lack: refined details, finely tuned proportions and meticulous spacing that let the reader forget about the typeface and pay attention to the text.

Lava supports hundreds of languages and three writing scripts: Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. Furthermore, a special version of Lava has been developed for Latin/Arabic typesetting. It is being released as the Latin component of Harir, and has been adjusted to match Harir’s weight, rhythm and contrast, as well as its three optical sizes.

Read more about the development of Lava in this ilovetypography.com article.

Lava was designed for Works That Work magazine. The magazine is designed by Atelier Carvalho Bernau.

Issue 86 of Eye magazine will use Lava for both the headlines and the body text. Designed by Esterson Associates

Animation: Bahman Eslami, Screenplay: Peter Bilak, Voiceover: Dinah Lammiman, Music: Ali Rezaei.

Harir is a modern Arabic text typeface featuring three optical sizes, the first typeface of its kind.

Harir is based on the Naskh calligraphy style, but is designed to work well with or without diacritics. Its letter proportions and stroke contrasts have been adjusted to create consistent word shapes, and dots have been carefully positioned to help balance the negative space between the letters.

Early sketch of Harir by Bahman Eslami, 2010

Harir’s counter spaces are larger than those of most Arabic typefaces, improving legibility and virtually eliminating noise around word shapes. Its letter combinations are more consistent, and the essential structure of the conventional letterforms is preserved.

Harir is intended for both headline and body text, and its Caption font has reduced stroke contrast, raised teeth and increased dot and diacritic spacing for maximum legibility.

A world of global communications demands fonts that support multiple languages and scripts. After Bahman Eslami completed Harir, Peter Biľak developed a special version of Lava to serve as Harir’s Latin character set, perfectly matching its weight, rhythm and contrast. Designers of non-Latin typefaces are often forced to adapt Latin design principles when they want their fonts to work well in multilingual settings. This can result in distorted lettershapes that deviate from the script’s tradition and heritage, impairing readability. Harir and Lava provide a unique combination that enables professional-quality multilingual (Arabic, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic) typesetting with no compromises.

Harir was named one of the best typefaces of the decades by Letter.2.

Read more about development of Harir in this ilovetypography.com article.

A special version of Lava has been made to match all three optical sizes of Harir.

Harir as both the headline and display typeface in a proposal for an Arabic newspaper. Design by Audacity Partners.

On November 8, 2013 Peter Biľak will be speaking in Moscow at Serebro Nabora, the first Russian type conference. Among other things, he will be presenting Typotheque’s latest Cyrillic fonts: a versatile book typeface, a groundbreaking multi-layered typeface system and a striking conceptual typeface. They bring Typotheque’s OpenType Pro library up to a total of 24 type families featuring Cyrillic character sets, 16 of which provide full support not only for Russian, but for other languages such as Bulgarian which require special letterforms. (Many marginal Siberian and Caucasian languages such as Itelmen and Abkhaz require special characters such as Ӄ or Ҿ, which are also included). Of course, all of Typotheque’s OpenType Pro families also feature both monotonic and polytonic Greek character sets, enabling them to support a total of 146 languages and making them an ideal solution for multilingual applications including books, dictionaries and internationally distributed periodicals, software packages and advertising materials. Here is the first new release:

Brioni Pro, Complete Greek and Cyrillic Character Sets for Our Popular Book Typeface.

Brioni is one of Typotheque’s most popular typefaces. Although it was originally designed by Nikola Djurek as a book typeface, it has nevertheless been adopted by numerous periodicals, including El Correo, the leading daily newspaper in the northern Spain, and the Financial Times magazine. At one point we were asked about the possibility of creating a Cyrillic version, and since we are especially committed to offering high quality multilingual type, we decided to go ahead with it. The Greek character set was designed in-house, and we worked with Alexander Tarbeev on the Cyrillic version, which can be seen in use in The Moscow News (Московские Новости) and St. Peterburg’s Деловой Петербург.

Brioni is available in two serif versions, higher-contrast Brioni and lower-contrast Brioni Text, and also in a sans serif version, Brioni Sans.

Newspaper Novosti set in Serbian and Croatian

Moscow News (Московские Новости)

Detail from Moscow News (Московские Новости)

Brioni & Brioni Sans

History is a project that began even before Typotheque was founded in 1999. Early experiments with a layered, modular type system began as far back as 1994, but it was not until 2004 that Peter Biľak developed the idea into a completely functional system.

History was designed around a base of Roman inscriptional capitals, and includes 21 independent typefaces which can be selectively combined in layers. These elements span a wide variety of types including humanist renaissance, transitional, baroque, script-like, early grotesque, 19th century vernacular and digital, but all share widths and other metric information for maximum compatibility. A sophisticated web application enables designers to choose and order the layers, as well as to assign colour and transparency to each, producing an immense number of unique styles. For more information, please see the design concept and The History of History article.

The Latin version was published in 2009 and became very popular, as our gallery of fonts in use demonstrates. Four years later, we are happy to announce the completion of a project that started almost 20 years ago, and to offer History Cyrillic and Greek, which were designed by Ilya Ruderman.

History 01 & History 03 & History 10

History 04 & History 17 & History 21

History 01 & History 11

History 11 & History 12

History 02 & History 06 & History 08

History 13 & History 14 & History 15

History 01 & History 03 & History 10

History 18 & History 19

History 07 & History 10 & History 17

Karloff is one of the most conventional typefaces in our collection, revisiting the history of Didots and English Italian models. At the same time, it is one of our most conceptual projects, investigating the idea of irreconcilable differences and how two extremes can be combined into a coherent whole.

Karloff began with a search for the most beautiful typeface in the history of typography (reflected in Karloff Positive) as well as the ugliest one (captured in Karloff Negative) and for a way to establish a clear connection between disparate extremes. The difference between the attractive and repulsive forms turned out to lie in a single design parameter, the contrast between thick and thin strokes.

The Karloff family also includes a third style (Karloff Neutral, created by interpolating the two extremes. The result is a surprisingly neutral low-contrast version similar to typewriter typefaces of the 20th century.

One particularly interesting aspect of extending Karloff’s language support is the exploration of cultural conventions specific to particular regions. Historically, Latin and Greek typography have differed in their use of contrast, and reversed contrast patterns is widely employed in 18th and 19th century Greek Didot and Bodoni typefaces. Using ‘normal’ contrast to design Greek letterforms can in fact be seen as imposing Latin conventions on a script which preceded them. In its Cyrillic and Greek versions, Karloff questions aesthetic preferences and explores cultural conventions.

Karloff Cyrillic and Greek were designed by Maria Doreuli, who takes a particular interest in reverse-contrast typefaces. Read more about the process of designing Karloff in the essay Beauty and Ugliness in Type design.

Karloff Pro will be available for sale later this year.

Tribunal was originally developed as the custom font of a cross-platform magazine, designed from the start to work equally well in both print and screen media.

Rather than trying to force digital screens to behave like paper, Tribunal works within the lower-resolution constraints of the display, achieving superb readability with simplified shapes and angular aesthetics. Its construction techniques translate well to the higher-resolution environment of print applications, giving it a distinctive character instantly recognisable in either medium.

Tribunal has been thoroughly tested through years of real-world use in the Slovene magazine Tribuna.

Although originally designed for setting periodicals with a limited number of styles, Tribunal has now been upgraded to include ten cuts, support for 86 languages, and enhanced screen rendering. After four years of constant revision, including 15 major versions of the upright and 11 major versions of the italic (with countless minor versions in between), Tribunal has finally settled into its last iteration.

Read more about the development of Tribunal and the design brief for the typeface here, written by the author Aljaž Vindiš.