Industry: Design

Typeface Design for Combina

Geometric sans meets cursive script, alternating dynamically as text is set

Combina is a display type family by Fontfabric that merges geometric sans-serif letterforms—drawing on the tradition of Futura and Avenir—with a romantic cursive script referencing early 20th-century type specimen books. A contextual alternates engine dynamically switches between the two styles as text is set, producing an alternating rhythm within a single typeset line. The family spans six weights (Thin through Bold) with Extended Latin and Cyrillic coverage, available in OTF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2. Released on 22 May 2025.

Set in Combina

Insights

The alternating dual-style logic is implemented through a reprogrammed contextual alternates engine that switches between styles dynamically as text is typed.
One documented historical reference is American Script from Pettingill & Co.'s 1901 Copper Alloy Type Book, used to inform the cursive forms.
The 2025 release added Cyrillic to the character set and introduced new OpenType alternates to smooth transitions between the two style modes.
Project credits separate roles for Type Direction (Viktoria Usmanova), Type Design (Ani Dimitrova, Stefan Yatanski), Art Direction (Plamen Motev), and distinct Specimen and Motion presentation designers.