Founded in 2013, TypeType became one of the first digital type foundries to emerge from St. Petersburg, Russia. Since its inception, TypeType has remained a foundry that prizes artistic collaboration and innovation, working with a number of graphic designers and typographers that include Vika Usmanova.
Vika has a strong background in branding and graphic design and she’s worked on several type designs with TypeType over the years. One of the foundry’s more recent releases is TT Trailers, a cinematic sans serif family that also includes a variable font for designers who use software that supports that option.
“The starting point of the TT Trailers project was the idea to develop a new generation of narrow typefaces for use in movie credits and posters,” the foundry said. They took a humanist approach to the project after finding that there were few contemporary narrow humanist grotesques in the market already.
TypeType knew they wanted to preserve as much white space as possible, regardless of the width of characters that would range from thin to bold when the family was complete. “The big challenge for us was the task of making the curves sufficiently smooth,” they said. To achieve this, closed apertures provide that smoothness while also offering consistency in the type design’s overall rhythm. Flared diagonals and loops in some of the letters give TT Trailers a soft vintage touch that effortlessly recalls the height and style of 1960s movie posters.
The humanist character of the family did pose a bit of a challenge, particularly in the Cyrillic letters. A number of contextual alternates were drawn to help preserve the rhythm of the typeface and while the design of some of the Cyrillic letters may seem a little unusual, they emphasize the character of the family overall.
TT Trailers is exactly the style of type you’d find in a movie trailer. Its lanky yet tall stature makes a dramatic visual statement while enabling the designer to squeeze a lot of words into a limited horizontal space. In fact, one of the unique features of TT Trailers is the font’s titling alternates, which are accessible through OpenType. The titling alternates allow you to split an inscription with an even number of letters into blocks, arranging them above one another while never going beyond the height of the uppercase characters that surround it, making it easy to design visually intriguing title sequences.
To improve upon that workflow even further, TypeType also made it possible to raise letters and numbers to upper or lowercase: the lowercase characters occupy half the height of the uppercase characters and will perfectly match blocks of double characters.
TT Trailers is an ideal type design for any projects relating to the cinema, including titling sequences, movie posters, and promotional materials. It’s also a great choice for publishing applications that desire a film aesthetic, along with website designs, album art, product packaging, apparel, and merchandise.
TT Trailers is available in Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, DemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, and Black, with an additional movie-themed Icon set for good measure. TT Trailers is also available in a Variable format, which enables designers to choose the exact thickness they need for each project. TT Trailers Variable “completely copies the composition and functionality of standard styles and allows you to use all the features,” TypeType said.
The Variable font is available for purchase on its own, but if you purchase the entire TT Trailers family, the Variable font is included for free.
TT Trailers offers a number of additional features through OpenType, including capitals to small caps, contextual alternates, case sensitive forms, standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, fractions, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, superscript, scientific inferiors, small caps, and stylistic alternates for greater flexibility. Its multilingual support is extensive, as well, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, Latin Ligatures, and Basic Cyrillic for exceptionally far-reaching global accessibility.
TypeType currently offers 47 products through YouWorkForThem, including serifs, sans serifs, display, and script type designs to suit projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio to check out the rest of their work and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you won’t miss out on any of their future additions!
