Responses by Ralph du Carrois, freelance type designer; Anja Meiners, freelance type designer; and Erik Spiekermann, freelance type designer, Fontwerk.
Background: We have regularly found ourselves working on a variation of the omnipresent Neo-Grotesque typeface in the style of Helvetica or Akzidenz Grotesk. However, each time, we aspired to replace the classics with significantly better concepts—with timeless yet forward-looking alternatives that help the simple underlying design gain more character with surprising, sometimes experimental nuances. Case is the essence of these corporate font projects: we left out everything that we felt was unnecessary in the world’s most popular typeface genre but made sure to keep the best bits and added new ideas and conceptual solutions for a modern sans serif.
Design thinking: People read best what they read most, and they read a lot of Helvetica and Arial. So, we kept the familiar look and addressed its shortcomings: easy confusion between similar-looking characters, tight spacing that leads to fence-like combinations of duplicated glyphs and too-small punctuation. Better contrast between outlines and counters in Case give characters more, well, character.
Challenges: Finding the best balance between three optical sizes. The secret of optical sizes lies in the possibility of making individual characters more legible, and the desired visual impression of a font can be maintained across all sizes. The effect in a headline is then identical to that of a footnote. Digital environments benefit from this adaptability, as the font sizes and styles can be displayed responsively when viewed on smartphones or large displays. Since Case is made for the digital era, the availability of optical sizes was crucial.
After we released the first version of Case in 2020, we realized we hadn’t found the right balance. With this lavish update, the number of individual styles more than doubled from 32 to 72. Customer feedback prompted us to harmonize both the Text and Micro styles to cover the scope of the core family and align the x-height of Case’s text across all styles. The harmonization also includes more finely graduated intermediate weights, a newly drawn ExtraBlack extreme and some subtle adjustments to existing weights. We are very happy with what we have accomplished with version two.
Favorite details: The systematic feature of terminating characters, such as c, a, s and e—hence the name—and their relatives. This design decision emphasizes the horizontal, almost compulsively forcing harmony and enabling extremely tight setting and experimental applications. As the weight increases, this feature becomes even more dominant, right up to ExtraBlack, which uncompromisingly takes it to the extreme. You wouldn’t normally do it this way, but this makes the family something special and even more flexible in some ways. Another characteristic and special design feature of Case is its linear grotesque “real italic.” That, as far as we know, is a standalone mark of Case.
New lessons: We learned a lot in collaboration with native speaker consultants, especially Eugene Yukechev, who gave us valuable input on the Cyrillic. Also, Fontwerk font engineer Olli Meier’s initiative to consider a Black master and go for a variable-first approach was really helpful and made us all rethink the project. So, we got to know a very productive exchange between the people at Fontwerk and us as designers.
Alternate paths: We are used to letting creativity go a creative way. Once creatives start from the same point with the same goal at another time, they will never end up with the same result. Kind of a turn around of the statement: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Though, we are nearly sure we would have ended up with something very similar, maybe.
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