Typeface Design for Tiny Gothic

Ten-style grotesque rooted in metal-era punchcutting research

Tiny Gothic is a grotesque typeface family by François Rappo for Optimo, available in five weights with matching italics. Its design draws on Rappo's research into metal-era grotesques, reinterpreting solutions developed by historical punchcutters for legibility at small sizes. The family spans expressive to rational registers through multiple stylistic sets, and includes an extensive OpenType feature set covering alternate glyphs, four numeral styles, fractions, ordinals, and a pictogram layer.

Set in Tiny Gothic

Insights

Ink traps can be suppressed via Stylistic Set 7 (no ink traps) and Set 8 (no ink traps alternates), giving users explicit control over that historical detail.
The family offers four numeral figure styles—proportional lining, proportional oldstyle, tabular lining, and tabular oldstyle—with proportional figures set as the default because some applications lack access to the tabular feature.
Reduced-size glyphs for numerators, denominators, superscripts, and subscripts are drawn slightly heavier than their full-size counterparts to maintain visual consistency.
Designer François Rappo received the Jan Tschichold Prize in 2013; he established ECAL's art direction master's program in 2009, which converted to a type design master's program in 2016.