Typeface Design for Brown Narrow

One typeface from London's Underground, one from communist East Germany—fused into a Zurich geometric sans

Brown Narrow is a condensed companion to LL Brown, designed by Aurèle Sack and published in Spring 2022. LL Brown originated from a 2007 suggestion by Zurich designers Lex Trüb and Urs Lehni to fuse Johnston Sans (1916) and Super Grotesk (1930)—two historically influential geometric sans serifs with divergent cultural trajectories. In 2019, Sack revisited a previously abandoned project to create condensed companions; the result was released as two separate families, Narrow and Condensed, in Spring 2022.

Set in Brown Narrow

Insights

The original LL Brown concept was proposed in 2007; subsequent development added weights and revised glyphs across the family to be more distinctive and harmonious before non-Latin scripts were undertaken.
Non-Latin extensions involved four separate collaborators covering Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic.
The Narrow and Condensed families were developed together and released simultaneously in Spring 2022.
Variable font production covering weight, width, and slant axes was underway at time of publication.