In September 2025, Brian Saffer, Art Director at FT Weekend Magazine, reached out to me about the possibilities of using my typeface Sonic Waves. He was working on the cover design for an issue about a misophonia, a hatred of particular noises. Brian Saffer created an uppercase D and added a dot below the question mark, to increase readability.

At the release date of October 11th, an e-mail by a FT reader reached me, pointing out how a typeface I made for the love of music is now used for the opposite purpose. That is not unusual in type design, since we develop tools that are not finished products but will be applied for various purposes by their users.

Sonic Waves was created in 2008 for the online and offline exhibition Into Infinity organised by dublab. As an occasional DJ and designer for the web radio station, I took it on to combine these two practices into one. Inspired by the spectrographic images that Aphex Twin embedded in some of his tracks and waveform art shared in early 2000s IDM forums, I was researching the possibilities of drawing or shaping sound waves into letters. A Mac OS 9 audio software that I was still able to run on my PowerBook enabled me to achieve this. In the mode that made it possible to manipulate the waves, the proportions were horizontal stretched. The process to create the shapes I needed was to work with elliptic outlines on transparent paper that I laid on top of the screen as templates to fill in. The typeface was accompanied by sound files in scales C, C#, B, D and H. The font comprised lowercase letters only, since many uppercase letters would have been difficult, impossible or proportionally awkward to make. The middle line lays at the centre of the x-height. This creates many restrictions which already forced met to set the numbers in italic. Without that trick, 0 and 8 would be indistinguishable.

Opening spread for the article by Samantha Weinberg

The other typefaces used alongside Sonic Waves are all-caps Avenue Mono and the FT’s standard Financier Text.

A Mac OS 9 sound editor with the ability to draw sound waves manually

Audio type specimen: here’s what Sonic Waves sounds like.

The titles in the issue of Financial Times Weekend Magazine from July 1/2, 2023, are set in Sud.

The cover story is about two North Korean defectors. After she fled to South Korea, Kim Joo Kyung couldn’t stop thinking about her first love. She decided to try to find him. The magazine cover shows the word love in large type against a peach pink background.

The Financial Times is one of the oldest financial publications still going, 129 years deep. In 2014, they redesigned their print edition, commissioning Kris Sowersby to draw a new typeface that would “produce a sharper, more modern newspaper”. The type comes in two optical sizes, Display and Text, and takes cues from Eric Gill's Joanna, Solus and Perpetua. You can read about his outlined design process on the Klim Type Foundry’s blog.

For the FT website, only the Display version of Financier seems to be used — with supposedly has to do with speed optimization. It boasts with being one of the fastest in the world, loading in a mere 1.5 seconds on desktop or 2.1 on mobile. In addition to this, the website lets subscribers (most of the content is behind a pay wall) customize sections and layouts, among other things.

Mark Leeds is one of the world's most established editorial designers and has given life to many groundbreaking publications from Bloomberg Businessweek (with Richard Turley), Elle UK (with Suzanne Sykes) and the much talked about redesign of the Financial Times (with Kevin Wilson). His work shows a very contemporary approach to the play of image and typography. The Financial Times Weekend Magazine beautifully uses Typotheque’s Brioni and Fedra Display to great effect.