Hanken Design Co. was founded in 2012 by Alfredo Marco Pradil along with his wife. Spending more than a decade employed in the graphic design industry, Alfredo has extensive experience in visual identity and branding, game development, advertising, merchandising, and product development. He’s worked with globally-recognized brands and has enjoyed a great measure of success during the course of his career so far.
Alfredo’s experience as a graphic designer has provided him with an exceptional understanding of what it is that designers are looking for when they seek the perfect font for a project. Ample flexibility and affordability are two vital characteristics of Hanken Design Co.’s products.
One of Alfredo’s newest releases is Cerebri Sans, a strong type design inspired by early geometric and grotesque typefaces. Subtle humanist details provide an undercurrent of warmth that simmers just beneath the bones of its contemporary simplicity.
“Cerebri Sans is named as such because of my fascination with the brain functions,” Alfredo explained. “I look at Cerebri Sans (all type, actually) as a play in the visual part of the brain where it (the brain) calculates all the nuances automatically without our conscious effort.” With that quite literally in mind, he hopes that this type design will create little or no disturbance in a reader’s experience.
“I really like the roundedness and a sort of ‘creaminess’ when Cerebri Sans is looked at or read,” Alfredo shared. “Apart from the lowercase ‘l’ not having the tail, I think it is a nice text face to read with.” He also hopes that, like himself, other designers will take notice of and appreciate the alternate sets that have a one-story lowercase “a” and a loop-tail “g.”
Cerebri Sans’ concept involved the development of a hybrid appearance. “I had to infuse rigid geometric shapes with humanistic features,” Alfredo explained. In order to blend a geometric structure with a classic grotesque look, the circles could not be absolutely perfect and many optical corrections came into play, a grueling part of the process for Alfredo.
His efforts have clearly been rewarded with the finished result of Cerebri Sans. Its soft elegance and finely-tuned legibility make it appropriate for a vast range of applications including headlines, editorials, publishing, advertising, corporate communications, white papers, educational texts, web content, and mobile applications.
Cerebri Sans is available in eight weights with corresponding italics for each. It offers case sensitive forms, discretionary and standard ligatures, numerator, denominator, stylistic alternates, and ordinals for greater design flexibility. Its multilingual support is extensive, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Pinyin, Igbo Onwu, and Basic Greek for global accessibility.
Hanken Design Co. currently offers nine products through YouWorkForThem and we encourage you to check out their portfolio because it will only continue to grow as time goes on. While he remains focused on his own work, Alfredo also offered a very useful piece of advice for aspiring typographers. “Get inspiration from within and be inspired by others,” he said. “This fueled my passion to make typefaces.”
It is a passion that is sure to lead to more wonderful work from him in the future.
