Fritzi Sans & Serif

Story

It’s what the World needs right now: Another grotesque sans with ink traps. And this one comes with a matching serif version.

I love the “Suisse Suite” from Swiss Typefaces and wanted try my hand on the concept of a matching super family of sans and serif. Technically ABC Dinamos “Arizona” is the conceptionally more coherent as it uses a humanist form principle for both types, while “Suisse Int’l” is a grotesque-style font and “Works” is a more humanist transitional serif typeface. But it think the difference between those two is what makes them match so well. As any aspiring typedesigner I wanted to include ink traps, because they are cool.

My issue with ink traps is, that they sometimes have this swiss cheese look. This is especially noticable if every joint receives one. I opted instead to only use them in cases where a bowl hits a straight line. I think it looks far more sutble this way.

At around the same time I was working on a small narrative game with some friends. We wanted to create a non-binary character and came up with the name Fritzi—which can be a moniker for names like Franziska or Friedrich. I like to tie a font to a character and developing a font that would fit with their personality seemed like a cool challenge. Sans and Serif feel like a binary in font design so it seemed only fitting to take the idea of a font family under the same name that is both sans and serif (and at some point it will be variable too). The character was interested in art but also working class. The typeface reflected that in being perfectly fit for body text, but due to the ink trap details, still anything but conformist. A typeface that is able to fit in a work environment, while not losing its character.

Right now “Fritzi” supports 23 latin scripts and a lot of font features, like stylistic sets and old-style numbers.

Features

Standard Ligatures

Stylistic Sets

Numbers

Misc

Glyphs

Latin

Diacritics

Numbers

Symbols

In-Use Examples

Published in:

—Typodarium 2024—
—YearBook of Type no.7—

Download Options

If you want to use the typeface for a university project or a trans-related project contact me.