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Martti
Posted by Tomi from Suomi in
5 Jun 2012 — 4:27am
5 Jun 2012 — 4:27am
Hi-
The Church of Finland commissioned me to make this family. Two of my old students re-branded the institution, and since there are so many independent parishes with their own graphic look, Kalle and Anssi thought it was best to do the make-over with typography.
They used Carter Sans for their initial presentation, and when it was accepted, they contacted me to make the Martti family.
I took some time to study the Carter Sans and Albertus, and their pre-Roman origin, and in the end I decided to just use the triangle shape serifs, and keep the basic design more modern, and since Martti is a display font, I kept the forms fairly narrow. I am currently making a wider variants for text setting.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Martti-sample.pdf | 221.74 KB |
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5 Jun 2012 — 4:28am
Sorry, forgot his image.
5 Jun 2012 — 6:48am
This one is very nice - congrats.
hhp
5 Jun 2012 — 8:09am
It is great, I really enjoy looking at it. My only concern would be that it might look too contemporary for a Religious institution, especially with that "g".
But this is a speculation at best, I know nothing about that particular institution.
5 Jun 2012 — 8:51am
But that's Tomi's signature |g|! ;-)
5 Jun 2012 — 10:14am
That [g] is great! I also like the flourishes a lot.
I'm not sure about the [&], the [ß], or the ascending stem of [p] in the italics. Overall congrats!
5 Jun 2012 — 12:16pm
Thanks for the comments, and I did in fact make a single storey g as a contextual alternate, so one can go about without my signature g :·)
5 Jun 2012 — 12:29pm
So I've been comparing this to Carter Sans, and am having a surprisingly hard time deciding if it's too close; usually I'm quite decisive about these things (often ending up with a more lenient opinion than many others). It's tantalizingly close to my personal threshold of tolerance, challenging me to better define it. So I'm curious what others think (and what elaborations Tomi, who's graciously not hiding Martti's origins, might provide). I'm personally interested neither in berserker protectionism nor an "anything goes, dude" attitude, but I am highly interested in smart and sensitive analyses.
hhp
5 Jun 2012 — 1:17pm
Well, I can just say that while both Albertus and Carter sans feel rough-hewn and glyphic to me (lots of sharp corners (and cut-and-corner solutions in the latter), low contrast, relatively dark), this font made me associate rather more to the sort of semi-calligraphic display lettering frequently seen in sophisticated Scandinavian graphic design from the twenties to the seventies, precisely the sort of look in fact that evokes "church" to us nordics. I would say that even more clearly than Carter sans, Martti marries these vague feelings with lettershapes of a conteporary dutch serif. It works better than with Carter sans (which I don't like, however well-crafted) because there's a shared chirographic DNA that binds them together.