Typeface Design for Lineto’s Typeface Library
From a 1942 school writing drill to a 16-style typeface
LL Cyan is a typeface by Aurèle Sack (2025), engineered and mastered by Alphabet, Berlin. Its origin traces to a 2003 ECAL class in which students studied Jan Tschichold's 1942 Redis-nib writing drills from Schriftkunde, Schreibübungen und Skizzieren. Sack returned to those sketches around 2019 to develop a full typeface, preserving Tschichold's humanist curves while modularising part of the constructions and introducing contrast at stroke joints. The family spans five weights; three monospaced weights sit on the wider end of the genre.
Set in LL Cyan
Insights
- Tschichold's Redis-nib model sat closer to Gill and Johnston than to the geometric monolinear alphabets common at the time, which shaped LL Cyan's humanist character.
- The regular weight is calibrated to match Tschichold's original sketches; light, bold, and black were drawn manually, while medium was interpolated between regular and black.
- Contrast was deliberately introduced at joints to smooth transitions, departing from strict monolinearity while respecting the Redis-nib source.
- Each of the five weights includes three sets of framed numbers and uppercase alphabets.
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