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.