Kayla McEncroe

As a graphic designer, sometimes it’s impossible not to be inspired by the Swiss Style, specifically the work of Armin Hofmann, who is one of its best exponents. Grids and grotesk and neo-grotesk typefaces are a fundamental part of the tools that make this aesthetic possible. A visual language that has caused full admiration since we were students. Therefore, we decided to design Armin as an homage to Hofmann’s work. Technically, we added stylistic sets applied to the letters –G, R, a, g, h, l, r, t, u, y– to make Armin more eclectic and suitable for the creation of any visual language.

Loew Next is the modern, honest and straightforward go-to sans serif type family aimed at a global user. Painstakingly reworked from the original design (Loew) to further enhance the consistency of detail between individual weights and improve its compatibility to support non-latin script languages. Details include over 800 characters with italics, alternative lowercase a, e, g and l. Seven variations of numerals, small caps with accents, Opentype features inferiors, superiors, fractions and language support covering Cyrillic, Greek, Western, South and Central Europe.

Graphit is a typeface designed by Lit Design Studio & curated by HvD Fonts. It combines clear, geometric shapes with edgy yet finely-crafted details. Graphit features uncompromising characters such as G, Q, f, k and 1. It works well both for impactful headlines and for reading sizes. The type family consists of six weights plus matching italics.

In early 2018, Livius Dietzel & Tom Hoßfeld started developing the typeface’s essential character and released a free font named after the studio, Lit. Just a few months later, Hannes von Döhren had a look at the typeface and suggested expanding it into a family – then publishing it with HvD Fonts. They drew every single letter from scratch, and also decided to give the font a new name — Graphit.

The family features six low-contrast weights, ranging from Black to Thin. Every character has been crafted to give it a distinctive and individual feel. Medium, Regular and Light are optimized for usage in copy text. For smaller font sizes & longer body copy, the alternate character set features a double-story a and a simplified Q, f, r and t for improved legibility. All fonts are manually hinted for optimal performance on digital devices.

Option is a modern condensed sans serif. Inspired by geometric architectural fonts. But despite the geometric construction every single letter was build based on optical evaluation. This approach makes Option more organic and lively in a text line. Option was created for wide spaces. Condensed and thin, but extremely sweeping vertically font makes your massage elegance and strong. The font functions great in many sizes and surroundings.
The family comes in one weights plus italics. Creating of bold weight is underway. Options supports Cyrillic as well.

Grava is Neil Summerour’s injection of warmth within the geometric sans font category. Historically, geometric sans families have been based on primal shapes — triangle, circle, square — and the more closely they held to those rigid rules, the more internal inconsistencies they showed. Angles won’t match up correctly, letters will lean, overshoots complicate clean typesetting, and idealized circles become grotesque and unwieldy in some weights. Because of issues like these, geometric sans fonts have a reputation of being cold, austere, even a bit “off”. Grava was made to hold a T-square and triangle in one hand while giving a welcoming handshake with the other.

The Grava font family comes in two styles (a normal and a Display), each with 20 weights (Thin to Ultra) and paired with italics. Its design allowed the three scripts of Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek to emerge seamlessly, ensuring Grava will find its home in multilingual publications. Even better, each character in the three scripts is spaced with every other character for a beautifully matched fit, and it’s a buy-one-get-all-three deal since they are all packaged together. The normal style’s large x-height won’t let you down in paragraphs, headings, and any call-out text. And have you seen the angles on those numerals? Pairing Grava’s numerals on a jersey is sure to catch some eyes, just sayin'.

Grava Display is purposefully quirky and sharp, and made for poster sizes, book and album covers, and those websites with a well-defined character — somewhere between playfully self-aware and overtly vintage. Flat edges are abandoned to make way for sharp points and conspicuousness, for geometrical attitude and respectful expressiveness. Corporate reports use Grava Display to take on a professional and current look. The optional ligatures (N–T, L–L, G–A, C–O, almost anywhere an ‘A’ is placed, and more) in both the normal and Display styles invoke a midcentury modernist and high art feel. Now that introductions are done, you can let go of Grava’s hand and put it to work for you.

BR Firma is a geometric sans serif consisting of 8 weights ranging from Thin to Black with matching italics. It supports an ‘Extended Latin’ character set that covers over 200 latin based languages.

BR Firma provides advanced typographic support with features such as case sensitive forms, fractions and slashed zeros. It comes with multiple figure sets and is ideal for print, advertising, publishing, branding, software and gaming as well as being optimised for web and screen design.

Steradian is an exploration of the geometric genre and although it has a geometric base, the widths between letters are not much different across the weights. That is due to the process, in which the proportions of the heavier weights paved the way for the lighter ones. It also has a series of details that make Steradian stand out and gives it a special touch. Some of its main features are the double-story ‘a’, its closed apertures and some of the capitals have a distinct personality (such as the G and Q). Read more about the design process at the Emtype’s Blog. 

Eight years after the initial release of Brandon Grotesque, the typeface has grown into a font family of 48 styles, including a version for small sizes and a space saving condensed version. This type family was completely drawn from scratch with the look and feel of the original normal-width version. Today, Brandon supports at least 116 languages, from Latin based languages to Greek and Cyrillic.

Grold is a post-geometric typeface made up of 40 fonts across 10 weights with normal and slim options. It’s a unique and modern sans typeface, which is well suited for a variety of typographic applications such as headlines and small texts. The Grold font family supports multiple languages and is available as both webfont and desktop font.