Juri Zaech is a designer and typographer based in Los Angeles, although his career initially began half a world away in Switzerland.
Back in the 90s, Juri pursued an apprenticeship in typography and worked in a design studio for a couple of years before attending Miami Ad School in Hamburg. “The more conceptual work interested me,” he explained, “and the rather large film productions are a very exciting aspect of that job.
Juri spent nearly a decade working for large agencies in Paris before relocating to California with his wife and the couple’s now-two-year-old child.
“My typography background never let me go and with my commercial work often being more filmic I started picking up type design on the side,” he told us. “I enjoy it as a balance to frenetic agency projects which always have lots of people involved.”
Juri said that his type design projects are a slow-paced and mostly solitary activity, although his wife, who is an art director, is close by to weigh in on his design process when he needs a second set of eyes on his work.
One of Juri’s most recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Fraktion Sans, a squarish sans serif family he began designing about a year ago.
“I seem to come back to this style a lot,” he observed. “There is a lot of potential in that shape, especially for rather technical designs.
“Sometimes squarish typefaces can get a bit fancy with heavily tapered terminals and omitted spurs,” Juri explained. “I wanted something closer to a basic grotesk, mechanical and sturdy, yet with expression and a certain flavor.”
Such details include an exaggerated rectangular spur on the lowercase “a.” In addition, straight horizontal terminals on a few characters “add pleasant contrast to the vertical stress of the squared design,” Juri said.
“Another detail that adds to the character are faux ink traps, especially in larger sizes,” he added. “They allow for non-tapered vertical terminals without clogging the joints.”
At the start of the design process for Fraktion Sans, Juri began drawing letters in Glyphs. “For a mechanical design like Fraktion Sans I do without sketches on paper,” he explained. “I space letters as I go to quickly find the rhythm I’m looking for.”
Juri found that the vertical stress of the squarish shapes provides a steadier cadence throughout the letterforms and improves the legibility of Fraktion Sans when it’s used in longer text passages.
Throughout the entire design process, he always kept the ideal and intended usage of the type design in mind.
“In this case it was mainly screen design for websites and apps,” he explained. “The technical aspect of the typeface plays well in those fields. The use in editorial and branding was also something I kept an eye on.”
As he worked, Juri held onto alternative design options for certain characters, later incorporating them as built-in stylistic alternates available through OpenType. After the entire basic character set was crafted, he completed punctuation characters, figures, symbols, and finally the diacritics. All told, Fraktion Sans supports Underware’s Latin Plus character set and with it, more than 200 Latin languages.
Juri told us that the italics required a different workflow altogether. He used the original upright character designs as his base, but noted that the electronically-slanted shapes of the italics required a lot of manual correction in order to get them “optically balanced and evenly spaced.”
The entire family was manually kerned and auto-hinted for crisp display on screen, making it perfect for print and digital display at any size.
Fraktion Sans is available in Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each weight. It is well suited to branding and identity projects, product packaging, editorial use, advertising, corporate communications, website designs, mobile applications, and so much more.
This type family provides additional flexibility through OpenType features that include case sensitive forms, fractions, standard ligatures, ordinals, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, slashed zero, oldstyle figures, and stylistic alternates. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Igbo Onwu for design projects intended for a global audience.
Right now through June 26, 2020, Fraktion Sans is on sale for 50% off of its regular price so it’s a great time to add this one to your font collection!
“I feel Fraktion Sans is a great tool for designers that want to create clean and meticulous layouts for a wide variety of projects,” Juri said. “I am looking forward to see what people will create with it. That is always a very rewarding part of any project.”
Juri told us that he has a few work-in-progress designs “in the depths” of his hard drive that he wants to revisit. He said that he typically plays around with a couple of designs to gauge their potential before settling to focus on one for a future release.
We know that whatever he chooses to work on next, it’ll be well worth the wait and we look forward to seeing it when it’s released.
Juri Zaech currently offers 14 products through YouWorkForThem, providing a variety of contemporary typefaces that will suit design projects of all kinds. Visit his portfolio to take a look at the rest of his work and bookmark it so you can check back for new additions in the future!
