Emil Bertell found an interest in the visual arts as a young child, eventually enrolling in an arts-based high school to further his education in the field. The multimedia coursework he took during that stage of his life would eventually impact the entire course of his future career. “I first got to know the field of graphic design and soon realized the big impact a typeface has to a design,” he told us.
While his schoolwork didn’t really focus on type design, Emil took it upon himself to study the craft on his own time. His first releases gained some notoriety, with inclusion in font anthologies while he was still in high school, and he later attended the University of Art and Industrial Design in Helsinki before establishing a freelance design career of his own.
In the early days of his career, Emil’s work was largely comprised of pencil drawings for advertisements and magazines, festivals, and posters, and he later illustrated the lettering for a television show’s opening credits. His free font, Lakmus, was even used by The Disney Channel for its popular “Shake It Up” series.
Eventually, Emil began designing type almost exclusively through his personal foundry label, Fenotype. He’s always careful to craft type designs that are clean, yet not overdone. “I’ve always felt that if I polish a font too much it loses some expressive qualities,” he explained.
That said, Emil’s portfolio of work is expressive and beautifully crafted, offering a variety of typographic styles to suit design projects of all kinds.
One of his most recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Allison Script, a hand-drawn signature script written in a bouncy, carefree hand. Allison Script carries an architecture that strikes a balance between feminine and masculine handwriting, further expanding its flexibility in a designer’s workspace. It’s a warm and friendly character set written with optimism and excitement — an especially perfect choice for wedding invitations and save the date postcards.
Allison Script features narrow pen strokes and a light structure that looks like natural handwriting, making it ideal for any design application that needs an organic handwritten cursive script. It’s beautiful in logo design and product packaging, album artwork, book covers, posters, advertising, merchandise, apparel, event programs, marketing materials, greeting cards, stationery, and social media imagery. Allison Script is a great option for branding and identity projects that need a gorgeous handwritten font on display.
Allison Script offers more than 100 contextual alternates and standard ligatures, along with discretionary ligatures and swash options for even greater design versatility. Allison Script is PUA encoded so you can access extra glyphs using any graphic design software. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Pan African Latin, and Afrikaans for graphic design projects intended for an international audience.
Emil Bertell currently offers more than 90 products through YouWorkForThem, including a variety of sans serifs, serifs, display fonts, and scripts to suit design projects of all kinds. Visit his portfolio to take a look at his complete body of work and bookmark it so you can check back for new releases in the future!
