Industry: Design

Typeface Design for Juneau

Geometric structure rooted in nineteenth-century metal grotesques

Juneau is a geometric sans-serif type family designed by Philipp Neumeyer at TypeMates, released in 2022. Its architecture draws on circular rounds referencing nineteenth-century metal grotesques such as Miller & Richard's Grotesques, combined with economic proportions and wide diagonal strokes. The family spans 16 styles from Thin to Black with accompanying italics, each italic set at a shallow 11.98° angle with a rotated construction to harmonise with the uprights while remaining visually distinct. Each style contains over 1,300 glyphs covering Latin and native-approved Cyrillic scripts across more than 250 languages.

Set in Juneau

Insights

The italic design is derived from the upright structure rather than drawn independently, using a shallow 11.98° slant and a rotated twist to differentiate it while maintaining formal coherence with the roman.
Circular rounds were informed specifically by Miller & Richard's Grotesques, grounding a geometric construction in historical metal-type precedent.
The family includes ten named stylistic sets addressing alternates for individual letters, arrow variants, Cyrillic localisation for Bulgarian and Serbian, a tabular-width set, and a proportional zero.
Cyrillic coverage is described as native-approved, supporting dozens of Cyrillic-script languages.