We are delighted to release the much anticipated Genath family by François Rappo. Genath is a free interpretation of a baroque type based on a 1720 specimen likely showing Johann Wilhelm Haas first design for the Genath Foundry in Basle, Switzerland. Soon renamed Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei, the very same foundry will produce two centuries later a better known typeface…

Since 2007, beta versions of Genath have been regularly showcased, most notably as the exclusive typeface of the Documents book series by JRP|Ringier, awarded at the Most Beautiful Swiss Books competition in 2008.

Truely ‘baroque’, slightly condensed, highly contrasted, with playful, fancy details, Genath excels from headlines to footnotes. It is available in four weights from display to bold with their matching italics and a complete set of OpenType features including small caps, inferior and superiors.

Since spring 2010, Theinhardt has regularly graced covers of The New York Times Magazine, which is distributed with the Sunday paper and reaches a circulation of 1,623,697 per week. Here is a selection of iconic covers designed by Hilary Greenbaum under the art direction of design director, Arem Duplessis, and art director, Gail Bichler.

After this successful introduction, The New York Times Magazine was interested in a compact version and approached Optimo to design specific cuts of Theinhardt. As a result, three compact cuts and their matching italics have been drawn by François Rappo, and will remain the exclusivity of the magazine for two years until june 2012.

 

Still an Optimo favourite nearly ten years after its release, the Hermes font family has gone through a major design upgrade. The drawing has been refined and all the styles were extended with small caps, superiors, inferiors and alternate glyphs. Thanks to Opentype, Hermes went through structural changes too: Hermes Sans and Hermes Serif are now reunited into one and only typeface with the serif version available as a stylistic set.

Finally, the font family will be fully completed this fall with the release of Hermes Condensed which will offer an text savvy alternative to the original design, available in all corresponding styles.


Types We Can Make – a Selection of Contemporary Swiss Type Design – is an exhibition that was curated by ECAL at the MIT in Boston in fall fall 2010. A second venue was held at ECAL in Lausanne, and a 160 pages book was published on the occasion.

An important update for the classic Didot Elder font family. The original styles have been remastered and recombined. ‘Small caps,’ ‘old style figures’ or ‘alternate glyphs’ are from now on conveniently accessible through their respective OpenType feature. The character set has been extended with new glyphs including ‘superiors’ and ‘inferiors’, and language coverage for Central Europe.