Industry: Design

Typeface Design for the Urby Collection

Sharp and soft as a matched pair

Urby is a geometric sans-serif family by Jakob Runge (TypeMates, 2016) built around the tension between dynamic, active shapes and geometric construction. It ships alongside Urby Soft, which replaces sharp terminals with rounded corners; both companion families share identical character widths across five weights, enabling weight or style swaps without text reflow. The collection targets branding for sports, outdoor, energy, and technology contexts while remaining functional at short-text sizes.

Set in Urby, Urby Soft

Insights

Urby and Urby Soft maintain identical character widths across all five weights, making them directly interchangeable without layout disruption.
Wide apertures on 'a', 'e', and 's', organic stroke endings on 'v' and 'x', and reduced forms on 't', 'f', and '4' introduce deliberate character variety within an otherwise geometric skeleton.
Each font contains more than 620 glyphs, covers over 200 Latin-script languages, and includes dingbats and geometric shapes.
OpenType features include contextual alternates, two ampersand stylistic sets, a tabular-width set (ss03), case-sensitive forms, and a full suite of numeral features.