U8 italics release

Fatype12 Dec 2013

In January we released U8. After a pretty busy year, we are happy to finally release the italics, making U8 our biggest family to date, with its 14 styles. As usual, you can obtain the U8 Trial fonts from our website: http://www.fatype.com

Webfonts are also available, contact us for licensing.

More details about U8:

U8 is a geometric sans serif, with 14 styles, designed by Anton Koovit. Anton started U8 as a research project about the Berlin subway system signage and particularly the U8 line that connects the northern borough of Reinickendorf with Neukölln in the south of the city, through the Alexanderplatz junction. His goals were to restore a piece of history, research a link between the DIN and Bauhaus, and translate the lettering of individual handcrafted station signage into a formal typeface. Apart from the regular weight’s upper and lower case, glyphs such as numbers, and other weights, had to be created by the designer, allowing for his contemporary interpretation. The result is an early modernist typeface, with wider proportions than most common geometric sans, a strong character, and a clean design. Initially intended for display purposes, U8 has proven to work well in text sizes. The typeface comes with a full character set for western and eastern european languages, and a number of OpenType features such as ligatures, smaller figures for text, tabular figures and fractions.

Matthieu Cannavo13 Dec 2013#

Amazing, really cool

Thomas Phinney24 Dec 2013#

Hmmm. This seems to be lacking a number of optical compensations I think of as pretty well necessary, unless... is the intent to do a slavish revival of naive/vernacular lettering, even when that is less than useful for quality work?

I am looking at these things:

1) Where a straight transitions to a round looks glued on rather than gradual (hmnu).

2) Where two strokes join, as in a curve to a straight, things get clotted because of lack of thinning at the join in the heavier weights (abdghmnpru).

3) Some letters are getting just too dark overall in the heaviest weight and might benefit from selective stroke thinning (ag, maybe es).

Fatype10 Jan 2014#

Thank you Matthieu.

Hello Thomas,
Yes, U8 is a "revival"… quotes because, as far as we know, it was not a typeface in a formal medium.
It was Anton Koovit's goal to recreate a design that existed only on signs and keep the very particular and graphic feel of the face. All the elements you mentionned have obviously been considered and consciously kept in the final design. Having seen the typeface used (including for text!) by graphic designers we admire, we stand by the choices that have been made. Your value judgements about quality, usefulness or slavishness are duly noted, but quite frankly, we don't share them.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 26 Apr 2015. original URL