Copenhagen has been in need of a typeface that unites the city’s many visual expressions.
The three designers Morten Rostgaard Olsen, Henrik Birkvig and Ole Søndergaard have designed and developed the typeface FP København. Now available from MyFonts in 44 styles: Serif & sans serif, uprights & italics, small caps, pictos-characters, stencils, sprayed style, OT-features, ligatures, contextual alternates etc.
The shapes of the letters are inspired by the city’s culture and the visual environment and design in Denmark in the 20th century.
It is relatively low and wide as the city itself and with rounded corners that give it a warm visual mood.
Neuropa is a five-weight semi-extended sans that projects a muscular corporate authority. The bowls of the rounded characters use an ‘obround’ form, and the apexes of the A and V and the uprights on the D and E are curved to suggest a sleek modernity.
Indikator is a family of humanist-style sans serif fonts. There are five weights in the Indicator family; these range from Light through Bold. Each weight has both an upright as well as an italic font on offer. The italic fonts contain slanted, or oblique-style letters. The letters in each of Indikator’s weights appear virtually monolinear, in terms of stoke contrast. Strokes end in either horizontal or vertical cuts, rather than in diagonals. The fonts have a large x-height, and the lowercase letters’ ascenders are taller than the heights of the capital letters. Indikator’s numerals are tabular lining figures; these are just as tall as the fonts’ uppercase. The fonts’ OpenType features include alternate forms for the ‘I’, ‘J’, ‘4’, ‘i’, and ‘l’ – as well as a more Scandinavian version of the ‘Å’. There is also an alternate version of the zero, with a slash running through its counter. Indikator had a lot of character and verve than many other humanist sans serif families. It feels a little ‘old-timey,’ like it is channeling design ideas from the first half of the twentieth century, rather today’s Silicon-Valley-style designs. Indikator is an excellent selection for use in corporate communication or editorial design work. It will surely also come to good use in publications about contemporary culture and lifestyle issues. Indikator is the work of Frode Helland, a type designer from Norway.
Ballinger began life as a single-weight proprietary typeface called baasic, designed for Dublin-based design office aad. baasic was intended as a plain, hardworking grotesque: a simple tool for clear communication. We’ve developed it into a fully-featured eight-weight family with matching italics. Sources include early 20th century jobbing sanses like Morris Benton’s News Gothic and Candia, a 70s-era typewriter face Josef Müller-Brockmann designed for Olivetti, which had unusually deep junctures that added energy to letters like m and n.
The family takes its name from Raymond A. Ballinger, the great mid-century American designer, author of ‘Lettering Art in Modern Use,’ and champion of elegance and readability. Ballinger has large counters and a generous x-height. Letters like a, e, and s open out gradually as they move from Thin to Black to maintain ample apertures, even in the darkest weights. Semi-oldstyle figures are available, as well as case-sensitive punctuation and delimiters. Italics incorporate subtle ogee curves to lend warmth and energy to the page or screen.