‘Krul’ is a typographic interpretation of the lettering style created by Dutch letter painter Jan Willem Joseph Visser at the end of the 1940s, which decorated the traditional brown bars of Amsterdam. In the beginning, these letters were strongly associated with the pubs connected to the Amstel brewery, given that Visser was the company’s official painter. As the years passed, the style became increasingly popular, and various business owners in Amsterdam and other Dutch and Belgian cities also commissioned its use. In the 1970s and 1980s, Leo Beukeboom, another talented letter painter, continued and expanded this lettering tradition while employed under the Heineken brand. Much of his work can still be found in the Jordaan and De Pijp neighborhoods in Amsterdam.

The Amsterdamse Krulletter, or Amsterdam’s curly letter, is strongly inspired by the calligraphic works of the 17th century Dutch writing masters, of which Jan van den Velde was a central figure. However, distinct characteristics of this style, for example, its unusual and beautiful ‘g’, originate from a model that was published by Johannes Heuvelman in 1659, which J. W. J. Visser referenced.
Typographic circles have somehow overlooked the Amsterdamse Krulletter and its heritage. The Dutch calligraphic hands preceded and influenced the formal English penmanship which has inspired numerous typefaces in the Copperplate style. In contrast, the models from van den Velde, Heuvelman, and Jean de la Chambre, among others, are a missing chapter in Dutch typographic history, and had never been turned into typefaces until now.

Conscious of the cultural and identity issues that arise in reviving a unique style, and concerned about the speed with which the lettering style was disappearing, Ramiro Espinoza focused the project of designing ‘Krul’ on digitally recreating the calligraphic complexity of these beautiful letters. Created through several years of research, ‘Krul’ is not a direct digitization of the Amsterdamse Krulletter, but instead, an interpretation that incorporates numerous alternative characters absent in the original model, and improves upon details where necessary, resulting in an optimal performance on the printed page. The typeface is presented in Open Type format, with an abundance of intricate ligatures, fleurons, and swashes, which permit the creation of numerous calligraphic effects.

The very high contrast and rhythm of the strokes in this typeface make it especially suited for media applications conveying a sense of elegance and sophistication. Designers of feminine magazines, advertisements, and corporate identities within the fragrance and fashion industries will find in this typeface to be an extremely useful and appropriate resource.
The great Amsterdamse Krulletter is finally back, and we are proud to make it available to you.

Recently editorial designer Ariel Garófalo designed ‘Mujer’, a women’s magazines published by ‘Panamá América’ newspaper in Panama. The publication features our Lavigne Display and Lavigne Text and we are not ashamed to say they look terrific on the pages.

Winco family can be labelled a humanist sans-serif, but in spirit it is more closely related to that rather rare typeface category called ‘glyphic’ or ‘incise’. Glyphic faces occupy a place roughly half-way between seriffed renaissance book faces and sans-serifs. The classic examples are Optima (Hermann Zapf) and Albertus (Berthold Wolpe), with Pascal (José Mendoza) sometimes mentioned as a more calligraphically inspired cousin to Optima. Instead of serifs, these types have flared strokes, or, analysed the other way around, are tapered in the middle – they are characterized by what the Germans and Dutch call ‘Verjüngung/verjonging’, literally: rejuvenation.
This characteristic is generally seen as a reference to letters carved into stone or, in the case of Albertus, bronze. Hence the names ‘glyphic’ and ‘incise’. The proportions are generally humanist, i.e., closer related to those of oldstyle and renaissance book type than to the more mechanic construction of the industrial and geometric sans-serifs made popular by modernist graphic design.

While occupying a class of their own in most type categorizations, ‘incises’ seem an underrepresented genre when looking exclusively at printing types. Even in stone carving they can hardly be called the norm: straight-lined roman capitals and geometric solutions are at least as common. However, the balance is somewhat readjusted when taking into account the project-specific hand-lettering of the mid-20th century. Of the many individualist alphabets drawn for book covers and posters roughly between 1950 and 1965, a great many of them were calligraphically inspired letterforms with lively, tapered strokes, that could be labelled as ‘incises’. Their designers were based in Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere; but their pedigree is essentially German and Austrian. In Holland and England a tradition of rather rigid, constructed lettershapes was loosened up and humanized by input from the German-speaking world. For instance, both Dutchman Boudewijn Ietswaart and British lettering artist Michael Harvey have stated that the post-1945 book jackets by Dutch-based German designer Helmut Salden were a crucial influence on their approach to lettering.

While conceiving Winco, Ramiro Espinoza studied the work of these masters of postwar book cover design. He also looked into German tradition of expressive printing types that had such a strong presence in the earliest decades of the 20th century – Espinoza mentions Arpke Antiqua and Globus Cursive as indirect influences on his new type family.
Having established a stylistic framework, Espinoza designed the typeface from scratch, independently from any existing piece of lettering. This allowed him to create an original, typographically consistent and versatile family in five weights, from Light to Ultra Black. Instead of taking cues from the details of any specific original, Espinoza worked with more abstract guidelines in mind: rhythm, angularity and calligraphic origin. This is specially noticeable In the italics, which are strongly calligraphic in nature. The step-by-step process has resulted in a typeface that successfully combines the high legibility and seriousness of a text face with the expressiveness, dynamism and subtle irreverence of the original hand-rendered alphabets.

Winco is a versatile family whose extreme weights – Light, Black and Ultra Black – make for striking headlines, while the middle weights work well in both display and text settings. Produced as CFF OpenType fonts, all weights come with small caps and multiple numeral sets, including superscript, subscript and fractions, alternate glyphs and ligatures, making Winco a typographically sophisticated family suitable for a wide range of editorial and corporate work.

Our font family Kade has been chosen by NL Graphic Design as the headline font for their new website. NL Graphic Design has grown out of the antiquarian department of Nijhof & Lee International Booksellers, and has one of the finest collection of original Dutch posters, catalogues, and books on typography available for sale. As Kade is bold and robust, we find it very well suited for this clean layout.

As every year I attended the Type]Media exhibition at the KABK in The Hague. It was nice to chat with the new graduates and learn about their projects and researches. Afterwards, there is always an alumni meeting and despite the dinner was not very well served thanks to a rather messy restaurant , nobody actually cared much. Good company and juicy conversations were enough to keep everyone satisfied.
I made a Flickr’s Group with all the Type]Media’s posters but there is also a gorgeous official website were every project can be explored. So, don’t miss it.
(In the picture above, one of my favourites, “Taiga” by Emma Laiho)

Spring has come with some new G-Star T-shirts featuring our Kurversbrug as their main motif.

When, in 2010, David Quay was asked by communication agency FWDesign to create a custom type family to be used as the new signage and orientation system of the City of Bath, he teamed up with ReType.
Bath is a beautiful city to design for, and we were delighted to be involved in the project. The process was intensive, and demanded a well-documented research into local values, history, and vernacular lettering tradition. We didn’t want a ‘squarish’ sans with a ‘modern’ look, or indeed any ‘neutral’ type family. We wanted something a little more idiosyncratic, but rooted in the identity and tradition of the urban environment and its surroundings, rather than just appealing to our personal preferences. The new family had to be flexible enough to be employed in variable sizes, and to work harmoniously on the beautiful maps and orientation graphics devised by FWDesign.

Originally, only a sans-serif was required, but during development, it became obvious that due to the system’s complexity, more clear typographic hierarchies were required. Because our original sketches had fluctuated from serif to sans and vice-versa until we achieved a consistent and coherent family, it proved simple for us follow up with a serif version.
Bath type family comes in sans and serif versions, each with regular and bold weights. It displays strong vertical contrast and pronounced counters. Though it’s not based on any existing or previous typeface, it does pay tribute to a group of alphabets and lettering models described as ‘English Vernacular‘ by historian James Mosley, and characteristic of the Neoclassical period.
The Bath family is modern but not trendy, classic but not old, functional but not neutral. As with the city itself, the typeface is conscious of its own rich past, while eyeing the future.