I love Type. It is one of the most important design elements to unify any brand expression. Typography has the capability to establish a unique identity across all touch points — from product to web, from signage to campaigns — and even in the most limited space.
But it’s hard to keep track of the latest trends. Recently the sheer number of Typefaces pretty much exploded. It became more and more easy to produce quality typefaces, covering a huge array of glyphs, styles, and weights in itself. Plus new technologies like Variable Type and Color Fonts expand the use cases.
So here are some of the trends in typeface design I noticed over the last year. I hope my fellow designers will find some inspiration, and marketing managers will get some ideas about what’s out there beyond the standard, ubiquitous Geometric Sans Serif.
You will find links to all featured typefaces at the end of each section.
Typefaces with exaggerated ink traps are one of the latest, yet enduring trends. You might have seen examples of this trend with brands like Figma. Some character shapes have deep cuts, where you usually expect to see the joint of two strokes. But where is this trend coming from?
While inktrap fonts are en vogue in the digital age, they go actually way back to the time of printing. They solve for a technological challenge: when you print smaller copy type on low quality paper ink is spreading beyond the edges of the letter form. Think news paper printing, or the very small type sizes printed in phone books. This is creating blops of ink especially where strokes are very close to each other. The resulting type image is poor, distorted, and spotty. This is where type designers startet to create more space between strokes for the ink to flow: ink traps.
Designing characters with overblown ink-traps does certainly not follow any functional reason anymore, but this design feature, once born out of a need to optimize the appearance of printed type, becomes a mere stylistic, decorative element. Most visible in bolder weights it can be used to create unique shapes of letter forms and in turn a memorable type for your brand.
A less known but emerging trend among type designers: fonts, where the joints — let’s say the top and or bottom angles of the A, M, N, or V — are disappearing and the two strokes seem to lean against each other. More a sub-trend to the previous ink-trap trend. It gives the typeface a technical, clean, sophisticated look. Works especially well with lighter weights. A great example is the typeface the Ad Agency TBWA/CHIA just updated their own brand with. The design studio Plau created a fantastic and broad ranging new typeface, which follows this approach and features the above mentioned ink traps as well.
If there was ever a typeface which triggers a color for me, it is Cooper Black and Orange. Originally designed as the extra-bold weight of the Cooper Old Style typeface, it became one of the most popular fonts in the 60ies and 70ies and beyond. From Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds Album cover to the branding of low cost carrier easyJet. Probably inspired by Goudy Heavyface from 1925, the rounded shapes and soft serifs made it the perfect companion to the emerging industrial design era of Panton Chairs, Bubble Lamps, and all things plastic produced by injection molding machines.
Cooper Black inspired a series of similar typefaces covering a wide range of variations: from very close to Cooper, to way more flamboyant old style versions. ITC Layzbones or Candice to modern versions like House Industrie’s Cooper Nouveau or Latinotype’s Recoleta.
We will continue to see more of these soft and bold typefaces. They see a revival especially in food packaging like in the Rebrand of Chobani in 2017. Koto’s Eat Meati brand, or Scobie brand by Alexandre Albisser.
Variable fonts are one of the most exciting developments. Variable fonts open endless possibilities, not only with traditional typefaces but also for display type, emoji’s, icon fonts, and more experimental typography. In UI Design we only see the beginnings of how Variable fonts can support micro animations and seamless experiences, when responding to user interactions like load or hover. What are the variables in these typefaces?
Usually typefaces come in different font files for regular, light, bold, and italic versions. It follows the ways how type designers casted metal types. Each of those weights would have to be cut manually. But since computer typefaces are a piece of software this is actually not necessary. So pretty much since the early days of digital type designers and engineers thought about creating fonts with two or more weights. Multiple Master technology was born. In short, typefaces which not only have two weights, but can also interpolate any transitional state between these two. But it took some time for the technology to really catch on beyond the type design experts. When browsers started to support Variable fonts, they took of. One of the biggest benefit is the lighter weight by using only one font file instead of multiple ones, which improves loading time, and thus pleases the Google ranking gods. Today, the weight, the style, the size of serifs, and other features can be affected by Variable fonts and often even controlled by CSS and JS. Some of the most interesting web typography leverages variable fonts.
While the technology is not new, it’s use in applications and especially UI design is only about to take off.
