There are two great technological constraints that a type designer can choose to tackle. One is low resolution, which limits the level of detail and dictates proportions between the negative and positive shapes. The other is uniform width, which restricts each letter to a fixed horizontal space. Wrestle with both constraints together, and each letter becomes a black-and-white chessboard that challenges every design decision. In some cases, these restrictions frustrate and get in the way of a good idea, but in others, having fewer options to consider makes the job easier. The relief that comes with denying design responsibility can easily lead to a grid addiction.
Gridlite, an experiment with a modular negative space, is the side effect of such an addiction. It’s a simplified and monospaced and variable ready to be animated, typed, scaled up, scaled down, rounded, or otherwise deformed.
Small caps are included for no apparent reason and there is a monospaced elephant, too. Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts are included, too, but with no guarantee regarding their legibility. Gridlite is primarily a variable font, two fonts, actually. One with a rectangular background and one with a compact background that envelopes the letters tightly. Selected static styles are provided (see below) and offered as a pack of six variants for each weight.
Designed by: David Březina
Published: 2020
Language support:
Variable font axes:
Weight (wght): 1 to 900
Background (BACK): 1 to 900
Element Shape (ESHP): 1 to 4
David Březina is the managing director at Rosetta. While you may know him as the designer of the award-winning type family Skolar, he has also worked on custom typefaces for Adobe, Linotype (Monotype), Microsoft, Google, and others. So far, he has designed typefaces for Cyrillic, Greek, Gujarati, Devanagari, and various extensions of Latin. David holds a Master’s degree in computer science from Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia) and an MA in Typeface Design and PhD from the University of Reading (UK). His cross-disciplinary PhD thesis studied visual similarity and coherence of characters in typefaces for continuous reading in Latin, Cyrillic, and Devanagari scripts.
He has also been actively involved in writing, presenting, and conducting workshops on type and typography around the world.
Font enginnering : | Johannes Neumeier |
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Greek consultancy : | Irene Vlachou |
Cyrillic consultancy : | Maria Doreuli |
Try Gridlite PE fonts for free