Untitled Case
François Rappo revisits Swiss grotesque modernism six decades on
Antique Legacy is a grotesque type family by François Rappo, published through Optimo, conceived as a re-engagement with the Swiss typographic modernist tradition descending from mid-century work by designers such as Walter Käch and Max Miedinger. The family spans fourteen styles from Thin to Bold with matching italics, plus a companion monospaced sub-family in four weights with italics. Its OpenType feature set covers contextual alternates, case-sensitive forms, ordinals for multiple languages, fractions, super- and subscripts, circled figures, and a pictogram layer accessed via a stylistic set.
Set in Antique Legacy
Insights
- Reduced-size numerators, denominators, superscripts, and subscripts are drawn slightly heavier than their full-size counterparts to maintain visual consistency at small sizes.
- Contextual alternates automatically raise dashes between uppercase letters or numerals to an optically centered position.
- A pictogram layer (ss19) encodes UI icons—navigation, media controls, accessibility symbols—directly into the typeface's glyph set.
- Rappo received the Jan Tschichold Prize in 2013 for his editorial design and typeface work, and established ECAL's type design master's programme in 2016.
Related articles
1 / 4Swipe
Keep exploring
Related cases
