Industry: Design

Typeface Design for Irma Text

Geometry meets cursive writing in a single sans serif

Irma Text is a fluid sans serif typeface designed by Peter Biľak (Latin and Greek) and Alexander Tarbeev (Cyrillic), released by Typotheque in 2011. It reconciles geometric construction, inherited from the earlier caps-only Irma Display series, with the rhythm of cursive handwriting. The family spans Sans, Slab, and Round text variants alongside display cuts, forming a broad typographic palette suited to publishing and brand identity work. Each weight ships with eight numeral styles, and Stylistic Sets allow per-character control over the degree of cursive influence.

Set in Irma Text

Insights

The typeface's central tension—geometric structure versus cursive drawing—was treated as a design resource rather than a contradiction, producing what the designers describe as a dynamic character.
Stylistic Sets are exposed at the licence level, allowing buyers to set alternative character defaults rather than relying solely on OpenType feature activation.
The family extends to three text construction flavours (Sans, Slab, Round) plus separate display cuts, covering a wide range of typographic register within one system.
Igino Marini is credited as a contributor across all three scripts (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic); Roberto Arista handled font engineering for the full script scope.