Layer FontFonts

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 Atomium came about as part of a proposal for Ultrasonix, an underground electronic music festival in Amsterdam that never happened, due to lack of funding. Donald Beekman’s main inspiration as he designed FF Atomium was a series of black and white photos that he took of the Atomium building in Brussels, built for the 1958 World Exhibition. Looking at this unusual futuristic structure through... Read More

Baukasten is the German word for “construction kit,” and that is exactly what this font family is: a set of possibilities for the user to construct their own multi-colored typographic constructions. Designer Alessio Leonardi described FF Baukasten as “an earthquaked bitmap font.” The six shaky fonts work well together when layering the outline variants over the filled ones.

FF Beadmap began life as a bit of fun with plastic Hama Beads from Denmark. Ian Wright’s children received a set for Christmas, and so he started making little heads with them, as well as type pictures based on embroidered samplers. Wright sent David Crow one of these for a wedding present. Crow liked the idea of making this into a workable font, and so he digitized it.

First used in the books on (and by) the German techno scene, and techno design specifically, FF Localizer is at the same time a nostalgic 70s and a 90s typeface. Along the lines of “we thought this would be the future, then it wasn’t, but it didn’t matter after all, so here it is”. The additional FF Bionic and FF Chemo families (originally released as FF Localizer Clones) are Critzla's personal... Read More

First used in the books on (and by) the German techno scene, and techno design specifically, FF Localizer is at the same time a nostalgic 70s and a 90s typeface. Along the lines of “we thought this would be the future, then it wasn’t, but it didn’t matter after all, so here it is”. The additional FF Bionic and FF Chemo families (originally released as FF Localizer Clones) are Critzla's personal... Read More

London designer John Critchley worked with illustrator Darren Raven to design a type family based on Darren’s spontaneous, symbolic, comic-like illustrations. The resulting design, FF Bokka, has four variations: Solid, Outline, Half Shadow and Shadow. These versions can be layered and matched with no less than a full set of illustrations from its Drawings style. Fun for all ages!

According to its designer, John Critchley, FF Bull is an authentic reproduction of old John Bull rubber stamp type sets, inked to varying amounts to produce six discrete weights. Each is fully interchangeable and can be combined or overlaid to provide additional variety. Certain of the weights contain special “dirt-keys,” which can be used to customize a piece of design even further.

FF Burokrat is Matthias Rawald’s first published typeface. His inspiration for the ragged, uppercase-only face came via weekly account statements from the German Postbank. The high-volume printers of this bureaucracy par excellence spit out hundreds of thousands of statements every day. The letters, based on OCR B with numbers from OCR A, vary significantly in weight from one form to another.... Read More

FontFont has published several of Rian Hughes’s typefaces: the code alphabet FF Identification, the 1960s-style typeface FF Revolver, and FF Rian’s Dingbats. His designs all display his special love for the world of comic books. This especially applies to FF CrashBangWallop, a face he drew in 1990 for SpeakEasy comics. The typeface is available in two weights (each with an italic) plus a... Read More

The original FF Dingbats font package was designed in 1993. At that time, there were no symbol font available on the market, except for Zapf Dingbats, whose design dated from the 1970s. The FF Dingbats package was the first symbol typeface for a new generation. The package included about 800 symbols and icons for the world of modern communication. There were glyphs for faxes, ISDN, disks,... Read More

The “FF Dirty Faces 6” package is a collection of eight grunge fonts from the 1990s, the last of a series of “destructive” font compilations published by FontFont. The advent of the FF Dirty Faces series launched a whole new trend in type design and inspired many others to begin creating or publishing their own lines of “dirty” typefaces. FF Angst was first made for use on the cover of a demo... Read More

In your mind, you know what the letters should look like. That’s why FF Fontesque’s funhouse-mirror–style distortion is so successful at disorienting and drawing in the unsuspecting onlooker. The typeface keeps it loose with extreme proportions, unpredictable character axis, a bouncing baseline, and wild variation of stroke weight. The designer, Nick Shinn, argues that all the irregularity only... Read More

In your mind, you know what the letters should look like. That’s why FF Fontesque’s funhouse-mirror–style distortion is so successful at disorienting and drawing in the unsuspecting onlooker. The typeface keeps it loose with extreme proportions, unpredictable character axis, a bouncing baseline, and wild variation of stroke weight. The designer, Nick Shinn, argues that all the irregularity only... Read More

You don’t need us to tell you what this typeface is good for. Just be on the lookout for this multi-code alphabet on record sleeves, stickers, posters and magazines: Layer its various styles for multi-colored typesetting.

FF Info is named after its purpose: the transfer of information. Its clean lines make no fashion statements, nor do they attempt any technical wizardry. The typeface was initially intended for use on traffic signage,and other wayfinding systems in stations, on buildings, etc. Because space comes at a premium in such situations, FF Info Display is drawn narrow; It requires 15% less space than... Read More

FF Jackie is a semi-script/semi-sans series of typefaces. Its basic variants – in regular and bold weights – are inspired from the lettering on Jack Daniel’s whiskey labels. The typeface’s designer, Dario Muhafara, wanted to create a face with a contemporary look, somewhere between a retro sans and a serious script. His idea was to create a face that is suitable for text in large sizes – above... Read More

“Typography is what brought me to graphic design,” says FF Karo designer Martin L’Allier. “I played with typefaces before exploring the world of images.” In an introductory type design course offered during his second year of college, he designed the first version of FF Karo (then called Wisigoth and Ostrogoth). A quote from Matthew Carter was the inspiration for L’Allier’s project: “Black... Read More

FF Kath Condensed is an early, historically-inspired inline skyline serif for headlines, though it’s quite at home in upscale packaging work.

FF Kipp was designed by Claudia Kipp who studied in Bielefeld, Germany. The typeface was initially part of her university thesis, based on a wood type alphabet from the 1930s she discovered in Leipzig. After digitizing the design, she went back to add special optical effects to convey the historical sense associated with printing from woodblock typefaces. The face has been broken into levels of... Read More

Rian Hughes described this design as “like a strong cheese, with knobs on”. The London designer recommends: “…best together with a cheap Burgundy”. FF Knobcheese is an unusual typeface reminding one of chunks of cheese with holes, with its circular inside spaces. And since Rian Hughes likes to design his faces to the last detail, it also contains the usual surprise tidbits such as a telephone... Read More

FF Koko combines blue-collar, utilitarian simplicity and soft playfulness.

Alessio Leonardi said: “I love the FF Letterine Archetipetti (little archetypes) and I think they love me too. I invented FF Letterine in order to be able to communicate with those tiny creatures. We send each other letters with the modem. They don’t have ISDN and neither do I. Archetipetti are really polite and politically correct, even if they sometimes don’t look so. FF Letterine Esagerate... Read More

Donald Beekman got the idea for FF Manga Steel and FF Manga Stone while reading the book “Sun and Steel” by Yukio Mishima. The two headline faces are constructed with elements from Japanese scripting and work equally well set horizontally or vertically.

With original sketches dating back to 2001, FF Massive already has a long history and has since been used in many DBXL designs. The face is suitable for logos, flyers, posters and magazine headlines where the goal is to project a sense of heaviness and slow the reader in the decode process. With its 2010 release the FF Massive OpenType family expanded to contain an outline version produced in... Read More

FF Nelio is a response to the original mobile phone culture. Bitmaps and pixels served messages in new high tech ways. But technology is to make people’s life cozy, so let’s have a cozy bitmap script font with a nostalgic touch of towel monograms.

What later became FF Offline Regular was made in 1993 for an art catalogue titled Oceaan Coalities. The stencil alphabet calls to mind the lettering on cargo containers, evoking travel and ocean travel. The project took considerable time to complete. As Mulder says, ironically: “Speed is what you need”.

FF Outlander was announced as being the corporate typeface of Nippon-Jones Offworld Colonist Services, a division of TranseurochineConurb Infrasystems. The four basic weights (Light, Medium, Bold, Black) are stringently applied across the ten subsectors that comprise the main organisation and are covered in detail in Paragraphs 3544-3998 of the TCI Design for Exploitation CD-ROM. FF... Read More

The designer, Nick Cooke, said: A couple of years ago whilst leafing through a typographic magazine a Japanese typeface jumped out and hit me in the face! This brute of a design was to be the inspiration for FF Penguin. I believe it was cut out of paper – it was crude and simple, but also sophisticated and very beautiful. I wondered if I could utilize the basic shapes it used; very rounded... Read More

About 500 characters from 43 scripts can be read as Latin letters. According to their formal characteristics a lot of the 500 selected characters are divided into four groups: serif, loop, decoration, and interruption. FF Polymorph is a typeface inspired by the characters of the world. Therefore, characters with the shape (not meaning) of Latin letters were selected from the Unicode Standard.... Read More

FF Pop is Neville Brody at his most minimalist. Built on a basic grid of horizontal and vertical lines, FF Pop comes in a monoline and a dotted LED version.

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

Drawn in by the logo printed on the side of a cup from the erstwhile GDR dining car company Mitropa, Johannes Erler started work on FF Pullman in 1995. The original, somewhat rigid, basic typeface was soon joined by an elegant inline version. An overlay style was added so that the inner and outer forms could be set in different colors. Upon searching, Erler found a number of train symbols in... Read More

Our world is increasingly computer-oriented, and we are confronted more and more with the digital displays that accompany the machines. By nature, digital display fonts have always been confined to a particular grid, which makes it a challenge to create all the necessary Roman characters. Type designer Steffen Sauerteig boldly took on the challenge by creating his font family FF Readout. The... Read More

The “FF Kisman” package is a collection of five display fonts originally made for various magazines art-directed by Max Kisman: FF Cutout, FF Network, FF Scratch, FF Scratch Outline and FF Vortex. FF Scratch was hand-cut from ulano masking film, and FF Cutout was made with scissors, too. FF Network, like FF Rosetta, was a very early Macintosh font designed for Kisman’s own use. All were... Read More

FF Scribble draws inspiration from hand-drawn layouts of the hot metal and photocomposition eras. The font has an important message: make a sketch of what you want to create before touching the computer. Often what you’ve drawn is better than the computer’s results.

The modular type system FF Stoned is made up of 15 fonts: the basis font FF Stoned Normal, an overlay font FF Stoned Scratches, and 13 ornamental fonts divided as follows: FF Stoned Ornaments One and Two (individual characters), FF Stoned Rule One through Four (for horizontal ornamental lines), FF Stoned Border One and Two (for borders and vertical lines), FF Stoned Mosaic One through Five (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 typefaces FF Yokkmokk and FF Yakkmakk were made during the junior FUSE project at the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf, Germany.

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