Best of FontFont

The family that became FF Meta was first called PT55, an economical typeface made for easy reading at small sizes created for the West German Post Office in 1985. Erik Spiekermann later improved and expanded his design to include more weights and styles, and prepared its release as FF Meta, one of the first and truly foundational members of the early FontFont library. As desktop publishing... Read More

It was only after seeking the help of fellow type designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby that Erik Spiekermann was able to fashion a suitable serif companion to his most famous sans, FF Meta. Rather than pasting serifs in place, the process took starting from scratch until a face appeared that looked and felt like a Meta, but that functioned more like a traditional seriffed text... Read More

In the early 90s, several digital DIN fonts – the German industry norm typeface – were available, but only in two weights of purely geometric shapes. Albert Jan-Pool designed a family that eventually grew to 7 weights, with a condensed, true italics, oldstyle figures, and alternative characters. FF DIN became a phenomenon: The typeface has pervaded corporate and publication typography.

On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool... Read More

FF Mark is one of the most iconic geometric sans serif typefaces of our time. Created by German type designers Hannes von Döhren, Christoph Koeberlin, and the FontFont Type Department in 2013, this versatile family draws on historical examples from German geometry in the 1920s. With additional creative input of Erik Spiekermann, they created a contemporary interpretation of classic German... Read More

FF Dax is without doubt Hans Reichel’s magnum opus. The design is a contemporary streamlined sans in three widths: normal, wide, and condensed. Suprisingly, FF Dax Condensed was the first to be released, in 1995. The concept behind the typeface was to combine the clarity of a condensed Futura with a more humanist touch. The result is a space saving and legible typeface of timeless quality. The... Read More

In 2007 Mitja Miklav received the TDC Certificate of Excellence in Type Design for FF Tisa. This award encouraged him to expand FF Tisa to a super family, with a corresponding FF Tisa Sans.

FF Tisa designed by Mitja Miklav quickly became a new-millennium favorite of graphic designers, in print as well as on the web. Its large... Read More

FF Cocon’s designer, Evert Bloemsma (1958–2005) described it as a “serious typeface.” Despite first impressions, the description holds up well. Since its 2001 release, FF Cocon has been used in an astoundingly wide variety of design applications. At large sizes, FF Cocon works as a display face, with beautiful detailing. And at small sizes, it remains surprisingly readable. The lowercase... Read More

Xavier Dupré’s FF Yoga mixes the harshness of a blackletter with the balanced rhythm and round shapes of the Renaissance Roman. Its sturdy serifs are a good choice for body text; They also serve as an effective headline face given their subtly chiseled counters. FF Yoga Sans is a contemporary alternative to the quintessential humanist sans (Gill Sans) and a steady companion to FF Yoga... Read More

Xavier Dupré’s FF Yoga mixes the harshness of a blackletter with the balanced rhythm and round shapes of the Renaissance Roman. Its sturdy serifs are a good choice for body text; They also serve as an effective headline face given their subtly chiseled counters. FF Yoga Sans is a contemporary alternative to the quintessential humanist sans (Gill Sans) and a steady companion to FF Yoga... Read More

Under the guidance of Albert-Jan Pool and Professor André Heers, Jakob Runge started designing the typeface that would ultimately become FF Franziska as part of his studies at Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel. The robust text face performs well in body text, while its more extreme weights do the work of setting headlines. Details such as its short descenders accommodate tighter... Read More

FF Super Grotesk draws from a 1930s design by Arno Drescher, easily the most popular sans serif in use in East Germany – the GDR’s equivalent of the then unavailable Futura. Today, the face is found only in period specimen books and early East German ephemera. Both served as sources for FF Super Grotesk’s earliest sketches. Its original glyph coverage was increased with special symbols and... Read More

FF Good is a straight-sided sans serif in the American Gothic tradition, designed by Warsaw-based Łukasz Dziedzic. Despite having something of an “old-fashioned” heritage, FF Good feels new. Many customers agree: the sturdy, legible forms of FF Good have been put to good use in the Polish-language magazine ‘Komputer Swiat,’ the German and Russian edition of the celebrity tabloid OK!, and the... Read More

FF Signa is radically different from most sanses made for text that were published during the 1990s.

FF Signa is a characteristically Danish design, rooted in architectural lettering rather than book typography. Originally created for... Read More

The typeface FF Transit is a highly legible design that works well for readers who need quick orientation while en route. Made to blend aesthetic quality with legibility, it was originally developed by MetaDesign in Berlin for official use by the Berlin Public Transportation Services (BVG) and Düsseldorf Airport. Based on the proportions of Frutiger (licensed from Linotype), it was freshly... Read More

The first drawings of FF Eureka date from 1995 when it was designed for the bilingual text “Transparency”. The typeface works particularly well with languages that commonly use accented characters. Because most contemporary Latin typefaces have large x-heights, little room is left to accommodate the accents which end up being small and tightly wedged in place. In many languages however, the... Read More

FF Dagny is a spare sans serif drawn in the “grotesk” style. In 2002, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) changed from broadsheet to tabloid format. The switch accompanied a major change in DN’s journalism, editing and design. Mario García of García Media had just redesigned DN two years previously in 2000. Pangea design’s Creative Director, Örjan Nordling, who had worked with... Read More

Developed over a ten year period, FF Balance is an experimental sans serif that subverts the conventions of the style. Its horizontal strokes are heavier than the verticals and its top strokes appear slightly heavier than the bottom. Another unusual feature is the family’s uniwidth metrics. All weights and numerals of the family... Read More

In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York added FF Blur to its permanent digital typeface collection.

FF Blur is from FontFont’s earliest period, made in 1991 by British designer Neville Brody. The typeface was developed by blurring a... Read More

One of Berlin’s must-visit cultural stops is the Prater, a beer garden in Prenzlauer Berg, a district in the eastern part of Berlin. The Prater easily has one of the most unique graphic identities in the city, completely handmade by artist-illustrator Henning Wagenbreth. The alphabets created by Wagenbreth became the starting point for a refreshing type family, FF Prater. To convincingly... Read More

“Schulbuch” is German for “school book.” This series of small type families named after regions in Germany shows geographic nuance: FF Schulbuch Nord for northern Germany, FF Schulbuch Süd for southern Germany, and FF Schulbuch Bayern for the state of Bavaria. Each of the three includes Regular and Bold weights. The typefaces themselves were drawn by Just van Rossum. The letterforms are based... Read More

FF Amman was designed in both Latin and Arabic and is one of the very few bi-script families where both the Arabic and the Latin characters were concurrently drawn from scratch by the same designer. It’s also the first typeface of its kind to contain “true Arabic italics,” instead of the much more common oblique versions often paired with the Arabic script. The unconventional family includes... Read More

Using Franz Kafka’s handwritten literary oeuvre as a source, Julia Sysmäläinen created the FF Mister K family, beginning with “the temptation and challenge” of capturing the writer’s free flowing penmanship as type. Its members, the original FF Mister K, a more relaxed Informal variant, and a Splendid style in two weights capture the lively charm of the author’s characters, whose temperaments... Read More

FF Advert is an idiosyncratic and good-natured sans serif family for text in four weights. Its design is an homage to Metro, W. A. Dwiggins’ humanized geometric sans. The family is appreciated by graphic designers for including two unique lowercase ‘a’ forms in each font: single-story and double-story versions. The typeface is the work of Dutch designer Just van Rossum. A sister design exists... Read More

FF Hydra was designed by Silvio Napoleone for extreme versatility, both in print and screen media. The Regular style provides punch with an economy of width, creating a unique overall impression. Its Expanded version is suitable for longer bodies of text. Other elements of the family include its characteristic soft ink trap connections, oldstyle figures, and true italics.

The spark behind the creation FF Hydra family came from observing 19th and early 20th century French poster lettering. Its designer... Read More

FF Suhmo draws inspiration from classic slab serif types, particularly those used as and derived from typewriter faces, like Courier and American Typewriter. Designer Alex Rütten took influence from these and several other sources when creating FF Suhmo, like the neon-lettering typical of old Italian restaurants across Germany for instance. The design has short ascenders and descenders, a large... Read More