Fontwerk was founded in 2019 by Ivo Gabrowitsch in Berlin. Building on his excellent network and years of experience as marketing director at FontShop and Monotype, Ivo has assembled a permanent team of great designers and font engineers that also regularly collaborates with a freelance network of international design professionals.
One look at the library and you can already see the signature style of the “typographic epicentre” that is Berlin: typefaces of extremely high quality and a lot of attention to detail. Useful, thorough, aesthetically pleasing – and always recognizable in their design.
Case is a neo-grotesk superfamily in the tradition of Akzidenz Grotesk or Univers designed by Erik Spiekermann, Anja Meiners, and Ralph du Carrois. They put in all their experience to design a typeface that captures the essence of the best parts of this genre but also adds in new ideas. The result is a design that achieves something that is incredibly hard: it has a familiar, solid, and clear base but at the same time it has its very own individual, contemporary character.
The versatile Nice Superfamily by Jan Fromm is a clear but lively serif that comes in four optical sizes. The smaller optical sizes are optimized for legibility while the larger sizes emphasize expressiveness with high stroke contrasts and sharp serifs.
And Christoph Koeberlin’s Pangea Superfamily is a compact but friendly geometric sans that brilliantly weaves in elements of grotesk typefaces like a double-story a or a “spectacle-g”. It comes in a wide range of styles and optical sizes and, as you would expect from one of the best font engineers out there, is available as a variable font as well. You can try out the different axes and read more about the design on Christoph’s website. Also remarkable: Christoph is donating 25% of his income from Pangea to the preservation of the rainforest and to large-scale reforestation projects.
Oh, and also make sure to have a look at Nikolai, designed by Franziska Weitgruber. A striking contemporary reinterpretation of Renaissance serifs that evolved on Future Fonts into a beautiful design full of character.
Fontwerk provides trial fonts for all typefaces and students can purchase all font families for the price of a regular weight. Fantastic!
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This post is part of the Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar 2022
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