Femme Type by Amber Weaver

Femme Type is a book celebrating women in the type design industry. The initiative was taken by University of the Arts London graduate Amber Weaver, who came across the fact that women were underrepresented in the discipline: whenever you step into the history of type design, virtually all names are those of men. The book Femme Type was her first attempt at filling this gap, before the online platform femme-type.com was even created. The publication displays the work of forty-seven contemporary type designers who identify as women, through pages of specimen, different immersive layouts, and notes on the designers. It was printed by Pressision and published by People of Print (In Perpetuum), following a crowdfunding campaign which attained its goal in a mere three days, showing that Weaver wasn’t the only person unsettled by this lack of representation.

Now that the book was up for a second print, a few changes were made in comparison to the first edition. Even though the overall layout stayed the same, the publishers chose a thicker paper that adds quality to the volume and to the printing. Furthermore, because Weaver continued to discover new women working in type design after the first print, new typefaces were used to set the text. All running text is now set in Neue Kramer Grotesk designed by Leonie Martin and Laura Brunner: a soft and legible sans whose inspiration comes from a sketch credited to Ferdinand Kramer, the man whose work questions Paul Renner’s (sole) authorship of Futura. Equitan Slab is a serif typeface designed by Diana Ovezea: it is used for the captions and all technical info. Finally, the remaining font from the first print is Mars Extended from Production Type, whose punchiness and wide caps are used for titles and some descriptive paragraphs. This diversity in typefaces is mirrored by the diversity of layouts and the different ways of visually valuing the work shown in the book.