Typeface Design for Lineto

Road-marking standard becomes variable typeface

Pirelli Var originates from Masahiro Nakamura's 1999 digitisation of Swiss road-marking standard SN 640 869, first published by Lineto as LL Asphalt. In 2021, Weichi He revisited the dormant typeface through a reverse-engineering experiment: shrinking the letterforms to simulate how they appear to a driver's eye at speed, revealing a hidden companion design. The project restored three original styles—round, angular, and square—added a non-stencil version, expanded the glyph set, and delivered the result as a variable font in six versions. Font engineering and mastering by Alphabet, Berlin.

Set in Pirelli Var

Insights

The original letterforms were drawn extremely condensed so they read as proportionally regular at driving speed—optical correction inherent to the source standard.
He's reverse-engineering method—shrinking forms to their perceptual endpoint—exposed a secondary typeface geometry the designers say they would not have intentionally built.
Variable font technology was used to realise the resulting shapes across six versions.
An early version appeared as a complimentary CD font in Type 1: Digital Typeface Design (Laurence King, 2002).