Industry: Design

Suisse

Six sub-families, one coherent system

Suisse is Swiss Typefaces' flagship type family, comprising six sub-families and 61 styles covering the full range of contemporary typographic needs. The system spans a Grotesk (Suisse Int'l), a text serif (Suisse Works), a legibility-optimised sans (Suisse Screen), a slab serif (Suisse Neue), plus monospaced and condensed companions. Typeface design is by Ian Party; script extensions were developed by specialists including Pascal Zoghbi for Arabic and Ilya Ruderman and Yury Ostromentsky for Cyrillic.

Set in Suisse Int’l, Suisse Works, Suisse Screen, Suisse Neue, Suisse Int'l Mono, Suisse Int'l Condensed

Insights

Suisse Works omits upward-pointing serifs on C, G, and S, and uses a horizontally cut terminal on the lowercase a — a formal detail shared with Suisse Int'l and Suisse Neue.
Suisse Int'l Mono uses bars on i, l, r, and 1, and a shortened middle stroke on M, W, and w as direct formal consequences of fixed-width spacing.
Suisse Screen is drawn on the same basis as Suisse Int'l but differentiates itself through wider apertures and a barred uppercase I to aid legibility where character ambiguity is a concern.
Suisse Int'l Condensed measures approximately 80% of the width of the regular styles and shares alternate shorter-than-cap lining figures with Suisse Int'l, Suisse Neue, and Suisse Screen.