The whimsical angular script by Latvian designer Gustavs A. Grinbergs comes in four weights and has numerous alternates. Jan Middendorp supposes that its most peculiar name is derived from Gneisenaustraße, a street and subway station in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Unfortunately, that’s not true, at least the connection is not a direct one. Grinbergs:
I’d chosen the name Gneisenauette […] because I think this typeface displays something of the robustness of German Fraktur. As I know this is an old German name and I like this name because of its strangeness and it sounds fascinating.
Gneisenauette is a wonderful oddball, and hard to place in time. There are references to mid-century commercial lettering, it has a strong angular pattern that is reminiscient of German Kurrentschrift from the interwar years, and yet its marker-style (anti)calligraphy is positively untraditional, with whimsical glyphs like ‘g’ or ‘Q’. This novelty quality is carried to extremes in the alternates, with antenna-like swashes on the capitals, or descending forms for ‘l’, ‘t’ or ‘z’.
The accompanying contemporary monospaced is — the then freshly released — FF Typestar OCR.
Such a pleasure to see the rarely used Gneisenauette in use! It’s at the top of my Weird and Wonderful typeface list. And not just because we live right off of Gneisenaustraße.
1 Comment on “Raz Ohara – Realtime Voyeur album art”
Such a pleasure to see the rarely used Gneisenauette in use! It’s at the top of my Weird and Wonderful typeface list. And not just because we live right off of Gneisenaustraße.