“LL supermax is inspired by letterforms from eminent Swiss artist, architect and designer Max Bill (1908–1994). A short-term student at the Bauhaus in Dessau (1927/28) and a prolific graphic designer early in his career, Bill developed a limited set of letters out of the rounded lozenge shape he first used on his iconic poster for an exhibition of pre-historical cave paintings from South Africa, in 1931. The first letters derived from this shape were made to spell the name of a ground-breaking modernist housing project in Zurich, ‘Neubühl’ (1931). A year later, he turned the lozenge shape on its side, and used it to derive letterforms for the logo of the ‘Wohnbedarf’ (1932) furniture store, a mainstay of the local modernist movement which is still in operation today.

In 1998, Cornel Windlin and Gilles Gavillet paid homage to Bill’s graphic design genius by taking Bill’s handful of letters for a lighthearted project to complete the alphabets, eventually released under the name LL supermax in 1998, on Lineto’s first website. They adapted the vertical ‘Neubühl’ letters for the upper-case, and the horizontal ‘Wohnbedarf’ letters for the lower-case. Twenty-five years later, Pablo Desportes went back to separate Bill’s two approaches, creating a full unicase glyph set for each of them, now called Tall (‘Neubühl’) and Wide (‘Wohnbedarf’).

To make this into a coherent system, Desportes unified proportions and contrast between the two versions. The circular counter shapes are identical throughout, while the basic element (still reminiscent of the rounded lozenge) is simply flipped by 90° to switch between Tall and Wide. This systematic approach also allowed Desportes to come up with an entirely new iteration of the typeface: a Square version interpolated between Tall and Wide. Add to this a subtle range of stylistic sets for less unified lettershapes and graphic impact, including some recalling the 1998 version, and you can be confident to be maxing out on Bill’s original idea.” — Lineto