TT Commons: A Sans Serif For Every Day Of The Week
Established in 2013, TypeType foundry was among the very first digital type foundries to emerge out of St. Petersburg, Russia. Founded by Alexander Kudryavtsev and Ivan Gladkikh, the studio is one that prizes artistic collaboration as a means to a successful end, and they’ve worked with a number of graphic designers and typographers over the years.
Ivan found his way into typography when he made the decision to take a hobby and turn it into a flourishing career. With a passion for travel, Ivan finds much of his inspiration in the styles of typography used in the places he visits.
As co-founder of TypeType, Ivan has greatly enjoyed seeing the foundry continue to grow and thrive over the years since its inception. The foundry has also shared its vast wealth of knowledge with many would-be typographers, students who wish to carve careers for themselves in the same field that Ivan did. In fact, some of those very same students eventually go on to join the TypeType team, themselves.
With collaboration being a big part of what TypeType does, many of their font releases have two or three designers working behind the scenes until their completion. One of their most recent releases, TT Commons, saw Ivan working with Pavel Emelyanov and Marina Khodak.
Pavel works as an art director, graphic designer, and web designer, so he has a very thorough understanding of how important fonts are when it comes to effective design. His own study of fonts eventually led him to dabble in typography and work in cooperation with TypeType, not just on TT Commons, but TT Norms.
Marina worked as a graphic designer for more than half a decade before being bitten by the “typography bug.” When she decided to explore type design, she did so by completing a font design course at TypeType Education – the foundry’s own typography lesson series. After Marina completed her coursework, she accepted a position with the TypeType team, and she’s been enjoying her new career ever since.
When three designers come together to work on a single project, you can imagine that it will be destined for success after it’s finished. TT Commons was released in early March, 2018, and it’s already reached a high product ranking on YouWorkForThem. This is an especially impressive feat for a font that wasn’t originally intended for retail sale. The idea for the font came from TypeType’s rebranded logo in 2016, and the designers fleshed it out into the official TypeType corporate font. That was supposed to be the end of the story. After a number of requests, however, TypeType released it into the world, but not before greatly expanding upon its character sets.
TT Commons is, much like its name suggests, based on the typical. The every day. It’s the go-to, universal sans serif that’s built to work well in just about every application. TT Commons is a standard, classically clean typeface that is a smart addition to any graphic designer’s tool set.
TT Commons is available in Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, DemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each, totaling 18 fonts. Its range of weights makes it an ideal choice for identity and branding projects that require design cohesion across various media types and sizes. TT Commons is well suited to an incredibly wide variety of design projects, including signage, displays, headlines, editorials, body copy, publishing, website design, mobile applications, posters, flyers, advertising, magazine spreads, corporate correspondence, product packaging, logos, infographics, presentations, motion graphics, and so much more.
TT Commons offers a host of additional features, including standing ligatures, discretionary ligatures, ordinals, numerators, denominators, tabular figures, lining figures, proportional figures, oldstyle figures, small caps, arrows, contextual alternates, and stylistic alternates. Its multilingual support is really extensive, as well, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and Basic Cyrillic for global accessibility.
Whatever your upcoming projects will be, there’s a place for TT Commons.
TypeType foundry currently offers 40 products through YouWorkForThem, a collection of fonts for all occasions. Visit their portfolio to check out the rest of their work and bookmark it so you won’t miss out on their upcoming releases!
