Founded back in 2013, TypeType foundry was one of the very first digital font foundries to emerge in St. Petersburg, Russia. Established by Ivan Gladkikh and Alexander Kudryavtsev, TypeType foundry has gone on to collaborate with many graphic designers, typographers, and engineers around the world.
TypeType’s releases consistently manage to strike a balance that meets the needs of graphic designers, particularly through their preferred design aesthetics and the high degree of versatility in their fonts.
For Ivan, what started as little more than a simple hobby would one day flourish into a full-time career. “Font design as a profession has always been very complex and mysterious in some sense,” he told us, but it’s managed to remain an interesting line of work. His very first typefaces were basic display fonts, but with time and experience, his type designs took on a life of their own.
Ivan finds plenty of inspiration during his travels. “I always try to pay attention to typography when I’m traveling to different countries, and I try to systematize this knowledge,” Ivan told us. His travels provide him with unlimited inspiration and brilliant ideas that emerge through his type designs. “Different cultures have absolutely different typographics,” he said. Ivan tends to show a clear preference to Scandinavian styles of typography.
Ivan has a vested interest in every moment of a font’s creation. “The sketching stage is very exciting because this is the time when you have to find a compromise with your ideas,” he said. Choosing a font’s range of weights is a vital part of the font design process as well, he said, “because this is when you have to define the widths.” For Ivan, the most important part of type design comes during the testing stage. “Testing stage is the most important one as your font begins to lead its own life,” Ivan said. His goal is always to create a font that is as correct as possible, on every level from aesthetics to functionality.
Over the years, TypeType has added a number of new members to its team. One such typographer is Philipp Nurullin, a designer whose focus lies in typography, type design, and web design. Philipp initially discovered a love for fonts and typography during a rather intensive font design course he completed in 2013. That experience took his work in an entirely new direction and he’s collaborated on a number of fonts through TypeType foundry, including one of the foundry’s latest releases, TT Rounds Neue, which was designed in partnership with Ivan.
TT Rounds Neue is a fresh take on TypeType’s popular TT Rounds and TT Rounds Condensed typefaces. Given that they’d been around a while, the foundry discovered that the “old rounds” really couldn’t cope with the modern-day requirements for typefaces so they decided to rework them.
One of the first issues they addressed was the visual balance between the bold and thin faces, and the proportions of the letters themselves. “We also completely redrew all the glyphs of the typeface while significantly changing the design of some of them,” they said. The resulting type design, TT Rounds Neue, carries a much more contemporary appearance and, thanks to improved hinting, it is better optimized for the web.
In addition to the Rounds family’s original Regular and Condensed subfamilies, TT Rounds Neue rocks a brand new Compressed addition. On top of that expansion, the number of weights has increased to nine. Each of the three widths, Regular, Condensed, and Compressed, offers weights that include Thin, Extra Light, Light, Regular, Medium, DemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each weight, for a total of 54 fonts. The italics were an especially involved project; it took Ivan and Phillip nearly a year to perfect them.
The range of weights and widths makes TT Rounds Neue beautifully suited for a variety of projects, including headlines, editorials, publishing, corporate correspondence, white papers, letterhead, displays, signage, advertising, logos, website copy, infographics, product packaging, and mobile applications. It’s also an ideal choice for branding and identity projects that need design cohesion across multiple media outputs.
TT Rounds Neue is loaded with additional OpenType features that include contextual alternates, case sensitive forms, numerators, denominators, fractions, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, lining figures, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, ordinals, superscript, scientific inferiors, and stylistic alternates. Its multilingual support is extensive, as well, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and even Basic Cyrillic for exceptionally far-reaching global accessibility.
Right now through October 5, 2018, TT Rounds Neue is available for a whopping 89% off of its regular price so it’s a great time to add this one to your font collection!
TypeType currently offers more than 40 products through YouWorkForThem. Visit their portfolio to check out the rest of their work and if you love expertly-crafted type designs that are loaded with OpenType features and expansive multilingual support, you’re going to want to bookmark it so you won’t miss out on any of their future releases!\
