Industry: Design

Typeface Design for Print and Web

Built by averaging 20th-century sans-serifs to approach—but never reach—neutrality

Neutral was designed by Kai Bernau as his graduation project at KABK (Royal Academy of Art, The Hague) and released by Typotheque in 2006. It was constructed by measuring and averaging parameters across a number of popular 20th-century sans-serif typefaces to produce a face without strong stylistic associations. The project acknowledges that absolute neutrality is unachievable, and frames the absence of period-specific style markers as a means of directing reader attention toward content. Bernau also published a book documenting the project.

Set in Neutral

Insights

The design methodology was parameter-based: Bernau measured and averaged multiple popular 20th-century sans-serif fonts to derive construction rules.
Neutral ships with seven distinct numeral styles, including proportional lining, proportional text figures, tabular text figures, superior, and inferior numerals.
Text figures in Neutral are shorter than cap height rather than following traditional old-style figure proportions, and integrate better with running text.
Stylistic alternates are exposed via OpenType Stylistic Sets, and users can bake alternate forms into a custom font build as default glyphs.