Website detail rendered in Aleksa

“Schriftwechsel T.” is a special feature offered on the website of Forum Typografie. Every year, the German typography organization presents a new set of typefaces. These typefaces can be selected from a dedicated menu. The selection is then applied to the entire website.

This typographic theme switcher allows type designers to showcase their work. At the same time, the visitors – mostly designers and typographers – can discover, observe and compare typefaces. The type designers introduce themselves on dedicated pages, providing background information on the process and images of specimens and in-use examples.

For this year, Forum Typografie invited Martin Tiefenthaler of typographische gesellschaft austria to curate a set of fonts. Martin focused on recent releases by designers with a connection to Austria. His selection comprises Bajazzo and Bajazzo Rounded by Lisa Schultz, Margit by Miriam Surányi, and Nikolai by Franziska Weitgruber.

A fifth, permanent option is Aleksa. The typeface by AlfaBravo has been in use since 2022. It was licensed in order to directly support Ukrainian type designers.

The profiles of typefaces featured in previous editions of Schriftwechsel T. can be explored in the archives.

Website detail rendered in Nikolai

Website detail rendered in Margit

Website detail rendered in Bajazzo

Website detail rendered in Bajazzo Rounded

Page for Aleksa, rendered in Nikolai

Page for Nikolai, rendered in Margit

Page for Margit, rendered in Bajazzo Rounded

Page for Bajazzo & Bajazzo Rounded, rendered in Aleksa

The STMatilda superfamily was designed for the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard, and is the largest custom type project the country has seen.

The design of STMatilda addressed the newspaper’s needs and previously existing issues from the start. The result is a set of typefaces highly optimised for cross-media newspaper publishing, and the German language.

You should think that German is a language well supported by modern fonts. Yet, the fonts in use before did not properly account for its typographic problems.

In STMatilda, however, typical letter pairs such as f with a following umlaut (äöü) read smoothly and without any collisions, and a cap height slightly lower than usual addresses the high frequency of uppercase letters in German. Needless to say, the design team also included the German cap ẞ (sharp S) in all of the five font families, which in turn consist of a total of 53 static and 7 variable fonts.

The design team comprised Marcus Sterz (FaceType), Miriam Surányi, Lisa Schultz and Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (Schriftlabor). STMatilda received a Silver Award at the Joseph Binder Award 2020.