Designer Felix Fissenewert designed Apparillo as a monospace font with optimized type color. Its large text blocks are easy to read and create harmonious contrast. Apparillo’s rounded Terminals and technical details make it the perfect headline font. It’s also suitable for technical descriptions. We see a quirky intelligence in Apparillo. The soft, curvy flow of the lowercase letters speaks fluent tech with a gentle, diplomatic accent.
Interesting font, interesting designer. When we asked Mr. Fissenewert about his influences, he qualified his answer by suggesting that, “probably every designer says this…” He then listed master painters of the late 19th and early/mid 20th century: Picasso, Delaunay, Monory, Hopper, Bacon. He also mentioned Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Bill Sienkiewicz, Moebius, Milo Manara and Bruce Timm. Per his love of calligraphy and lettering, he mentioned Jessica Hische, John Stevens and Martina Flor, “just to mention a very few.” And the first time he recognized type as a style element is when he read Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, noting that each chapter was introduced by one uppercase letter in blackletter.
Not every designer says that.
Mr. Fissenewert is clearly a modest man, and as a corollary to that, he looks to his locality for influence: the Ruhrgebiet. The Ruhrgebiet is a western German region consisting of several cities that have grown to be nearly one. The result is Germany’s largest urban area with 5,000,000 plus people. Cities include Essen, Bochum, Duisburg, and Dortmund. The heavy industry and mining that once defined the area have been mainly replaced with tech and service, but the culture and traditions of this hardworking region remain strong.
The area has a distinct dialect which informs Mr. Fissenewert’s font names: Apparillo means “machine” or “device” in Ruhrgebiet German. Mr. Fissenewert’s Töffte is print designed specifically with beverage labels in mind, as Töffte means something in good order that brings fun and joy. Something like Essen’s Stauder, for instance, or Bochum’s Moritz Fiege which has been bringing joy since 1736. We hope to see Töffte on your own joy-bringing beverage in the near future, with bold headlines in Apparillo telling all the world.
