Ivan Gladkikh and Alexander Kudryavtsev established the TypeType foundry in 2013 and it became one of the first dedicated type foundries in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Over the years that have passed, the foundry has worked with international companies that include Acer, Apple App Store, id Software, KHL, and the government of Saint Petersburg.
TypeType’s designs are expertly drawn and later tested for optimization. Because TypeType releases designs targeted at an international design market, their work typically provides extensive multilingual support. Versatility is also a key component of their work and they strive to offer a good range of weights and widths within every type family, OpenType features that make the most of a designer’s workflow, all while ensuring that their products are affordable.
TypeType prides itself on its cultural diversity, noting that it helps their foundry to offer typography that appeals to graphic designers around the world. TypeType has worked with a growing number of graphic designers and typographers since it began, adding new people to its talented team as time goes on.
One of its full-time type designers is Vika Usmanova, a typographer with a rich background in branding and corporate identity. Vika took a six-month design course through TypeType and joined the team. She has released a number of type designs through TypeType and TypeType LLC including one of its most recent designs, TT Alientz.
TT Alientz is comprised of three fonts, a grotesque sans serif, a wildly sharp serif, and a variable font that enables the user “to make a visual journey from a laconic extraterrestrial grotesque to a very prickly display serif.”
“As part of this project, we decided to investigate the influence of a foreign substance and the consequent transformation of the original forms,” TypeType said. The result of these foreign substances led to some pretty extreme visual changes.
TT Alientz Grotesque is a “fairly neat hipster” sans serif design with playful curves and details that add a little bit of peculiarity, emphasizing the alien concept that the family represents. It’s unexpected and unique, but that only adds to its charm. Its sharp elements stand out in larger displays and signage, but they don’t hinder the font’s legibility in smaller point. TT Alientz Grotesque is perfect for website designs, text blocks, logos, publishing, corporate applications, and mobile applications.
TT Alientz Serif is considered to be the “infected” variant of its grotesque sibling. “Unlike the grotesque, the serif is dynamic, viscous, ductile and very prickly,” TypeType said. TT Alientz Serif is anything but your average serif, featuring not-quite-standard contrast and unusual design elements like inward-pointing, razor-sharp serifs. Little details like these make this type design stand out among the rest and its particularly well-suited to titling, displays, book covers, promotional and marketing materials, logos, merchandise, and product packaging that needs an unusual serif to take center stage.
TT Alientz Variable offers incredible design versatility if your graphics program and browser supports it. (Click here to check your program and browser support.) The variability of this typeface affects the entire style of the font. As the slider adjusts the variable axis, the typeface gradually shifts from a reticent grotesque sans serif to the wild and thorny serif.
The TT Alientz family offers contextual alternates, standard ligatures, ordinals, and oldstyle figures for greater versatility. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and Basic Cyrillic for design projects intended for an international audience.
TypeType LLC currently offers two products through its portfolio and 49 products through its main TypeType portfolio on YouWorkForThem. They offer a variety of type designs to suit projects of all kinds so check back often for new releases!
