Typeface Design for Lineto
One lozenge, flipped 90°—two alphabets, three subfamilies
LL Supermax is a typeface family rooted in a handful of letterforms Max Bill derived from a rounded lozenge shape for two 1930s Swiss modernist projects—the Neubühl housing scheme and Wohnbedarf furniture store. Cornel Windlin and Gilles Gavillet completed Bill's partial alphabets into a full typeface released on Lineto's first website in 1998. In 2024, Pablo Desportes redrawn and expanded the family, separating Bill's vertical and horizontal approaches into distinct Tall and Wide unicase sets, then interpolating a Square variant between them.
Set in LL Supermax
Insights
- Bill's original letters were never a complete alphabet; the 1998 designers extended them as a lighthearted project, mixing Neubühl verticals for uppercase and Wohnbedarf horizontals for lowercase.
- Desportes's 2024 revision disentangles that mixture, giving each historical source its own full unicase glyph set rather than splitting them across cases.
- The Square variant is not a separate design but an interpolation midpoint between Tall and Wide, made possible by unifying proportions and contrast across the two extremes.
- Circular counter shapes are held constant throughout all three subfamilies; only the orientation of the lozenge-derived stroke element changes.
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