131 A few years ago, I found a basic specimen of an unsung typewriter font by Joseph Müller-Brockmann for Olivetti. The font, named Candia, was rather plain, almost tedious looking, but something about its proportions and its weight was appealing. I began redrawing it based on that specimen, and I noticed that some of the counter forms and critical joints had slight details that gave an impression of reversed ink-traps. These little details guided my design throughout and became a fundamental element. Only later when I came across a better specimen of Candia, I realized that those elements never actually existed and their appearance was due to the poor print quality of the first specimen. Nevertheless, those details functioned very well in my font, and so they remained. Since Lettera was released, I’ve been contemplating creating a proportional text version of it, but I was concerned that the Lettera character would get lost and the font would look too “normal.” Eventually I made an attempt and the resulting font maintains the style and persona of Lettera and works really well as body text. Later this year Lineto will release it in three weights and three italics in an OpenType Pro format. Kobi Benezri is an Israeli-born designer and art director. After studying graphic design at the Bezal’el Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, he moved to New York in 2002 and completed his studies at the Cooper Union School of Art. Kobi was the art director of I.D., The International Design Magazine, between 2004 and 2007. In 2008, he moved to Zurich, Switzerland and founded Kobi Benezri Studio, a design practice working in various disciplines: type design, books, posters, websites, and identities. www.kobibenezri.com
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37 Editor Philippe Desarzens, 2002 Optimo, Geneva CH www.optimo.ch Celebrating the glorious industrial past of Swiss typewriter brand «Hermes», Editor is inspired by some typefaces available with the portable
model «Media». This particular machine, successor of the famous «Hermes Baby», practical and cheap, kind of early laptop, became the most popular choice of journalists and reporters in Europe and the USA. It is their last “good old” machine. The font offers a mixture of formal construction and soft details making an original typewriter text font out of it. The Editor, available at www. optimo.ch, has been extended to a three weights family with italic cuts. Philippe Desarzens is a graphic designer established in Zurich since 2001. He produces different printbased works including posters, books and catalogues and worked as an art director for different Swiss magazines. He also designs fonts, some of which are available through Lineto and Optimo. Since 2007, he is teaching at the University of Applied Arts in Lucerne, Switzerland. www.phildesarzens.net
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39 DOS Erich Brechbühl, 2010 Mixer, Lucerne CH www.mixer.ch DOS is based on the old screen font of MS-DOS-computers. I liked the look of bold and light letters on the monochrome-monitor. So I created a font where the weight of the font is continuously adjustable only by changing the weight of the line (using black or white lines). Erich Brechbühl was born on the 3rd of October 1977 in Sursee, Switzerland. After a typography apprenticeship near Lucerne (1994–1998) he began an apprenticeship in graphic design at the studio of Niklaus Troxler, Willisau (1998–2002). Then Erich moved to Germany where he did an internship at MetaDesign, Berlin. Back in Lucerne he founded his own graphic design studio «Mixer». Since 2007 he’s a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). www.mixer.ch
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41 Simplon BP Mono Emmanuel Rey, Release 2010 b+p swiss typefaces, Lausanne CH www.swisstypefaces.com Simplon BP is a self-initiated type family started in 2008. Basically, the typeface is constructed on a single curve for all the lowercases and another one for the uppercases. Despite the rigorous process in the design of the shapes of the characters, the aim was to obtain a typeface as powerful for small size texts as for big size headlines as well as rather having a Swiss modernist feeling than looking like a playful constructed typeface from the 90s. The monospace style is well served by the strong regularity in the proportions of the letters and by the repetition of the shapes. Taking more freedom in the design of the monospaced characters with geometric numbers, special diacritics and custom punctuation added a wilder touch to the highly schematic building-process of the fonts. Emmanuel Rey graduated from ECAL, University of Art and Design, Lausanne, where he studied under some of the most influential graphic designers. He received his BA in 2007 with Honors and was awarded a Prize for Excellency for a type family designed for tabloids headlines. In 2009 he was the recepient of a Swiss government residency in Berlin. He now lives in Berlin and Switzerland and works as an independant graphic and type designer, convenes workshops and freelances for diverse design studios. www.emmanuelrey.ch
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