Typeface Design for Gravur

The typeface hiding in plain sight on nearly every Swiss letterbox

LL Gravur Condensed is a typeface designed by Cornel Windlin, first released by Lineto in 1998, drawn from the engraving font that appears on roughly 95% of Swiss letterboxes and door bells. The family was redrawn from scratch and published in 2019 with new italic cuts, with contributions from Radek Sidun and font engineering by Alphabet, Berlin. The redesign required resolving two mechanical-engraving artefacts that look awkward when digitised: bolder weights growing disproportionately taller and wider, and all strokes being uniform in width regardless of optical needs.

Set in LL Gravur Condensed

Insights

Bolder engraved letters grow taller and wider because a wider pen follows the same single path; the digital versions were manually shrunk and narrowed to restore proportional consistency across weights.
Mechanical engraving produces uniform stroke widths throughout a letter; optical corrections were applied in the digital redraw to compensate for the visual awkwardness this creates.
The original 1998 release comprised five weights plus an unpublished set of five alternate versions; italic cuts were only added in the 2019 redesign.
Font engineering and mastering was handled by Alphabet, Berlin.