About Sharp Grotesk
Sharp Grotesk Global is Sharp Type’s largest superfamily to date. It’s our most comprehensive Latin typeface, with twelve weights and seven widths in Roman and Italic styles. Sharp Grotesk now also represents our first multi-script release, with extensions in Greek, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Thai. Finally, a Latin variable font rounds out the collection. What began as a hand-drawn lettering poster in 2011 is arguably our most versatile typeface, endlessly adaptable and scalable. It’s the culmination of years of work, and it’s a prelude for what’s to come at Sharp Type.
Sharp Grotesk Hangul includes: 6 weights, 6 widths, 36 total fonts
About Sharp Grotesk
Sharp Grotesk Global contains an entire universe within itself. Lucas Sharp’s monument to Adrian Frutiger sits at the intersection of modernist rigor and hand-drawn vernacular, where Swiss styling collides with the unexpected construction and wonky imperfectionism of 20th-century American wood type. The original Latin release is notable for its massive 7 weights and 21 widths in roman and italic styles. This variety lends the typeface an incredible range of moods, making it endlessly adaptable and scalable on a cross axis of weight, width, and now variable font technology and an expansive language extension.
From the start, we wanted to achieve a harmony of texture, rhythm, and form across these extensions, rather than enforcing any sort of superficial aesthetic uniformity. Over the last four years, we’ve worked on Greek, Cyrillic, Thai, and Hangul versions of Sharp Grotesk with native type designers. This means that components were developed from the native script and then adapted to the aesthetics and construction of Sharp Grotesk. The balancing act here was to ensure a strong historical and cultural understanding of the native scripts while not shying away from pushing boundaries and creating new forms. These energetic interpretations sit together beautifully on the same page and also succeed as independent typefaces, achieving a cultural and aesthetic harmony across this globe-spanning superfamily.

Latin Construction
Like Frutiger’s Univers, Sharp Grotesk spans the gamut of width and weight and explores the edges of what is possible in sans-serif typography, organizing the resulting family by width and weight using a numeric system of style naming. The Latin superfamily consists of 14 roman/italic pairs. The style names correspond with a number: 05 - 25, which represents the 21 widths of Sharp Grotesk. For example: the narrowest and boldest font in the family is ‘Sharp Grotesk Black Italic - 05’. The thinnest and widest font in the family is ‘Sharp Grotesk Thin - 25’.

Within the Latin family, different width and weight ranges are optimized for different optical sizes. The 20s are the most standard widths and a good starting point for designers in terms of overall utility. The extremes on either end of both the width and weight axes of the spectrum tend to require display setting, with the ultra-narrow 05 widths and the tightly-packed Black weights requiring the largest display settings.

Immediately noticeable features are the affably wonky nods to the wood type era, such as the highly swashy ear of the “g” and the curvaceous leg of the “R”. The character of the typeface shines through the construction of its letterforms, which transition from a capsule-based letter shape found in the more condensed widths, which gradually transform toward the fully round shapes in the 20-25 widths. Ink traps—a strange feature for a typeface so informed by wood type—are useful in optimizing both large and mid range optical sizes in different ways. In the mid to thin widths, they help maintain texture and legibility at smaller sizes. In the tightly-packed Black weight, they facilitate the hairline negative space that defines the letters.

Hangul Construction
Korean type and graphic designer Minjoo Ham began working with Lucas on Sharp Grotesk Hangul in 2019. For the first month of the design process, Minjoo was invited to work in-person with the Sharp Type team, who were then based in Madrid. The standard character set took a year to complete. “I was sketching and digitizing Hangul during this time and was able to discuss certain details with Lucas in person,” says Minjoo. “He suggested design directions and even drew some of the Hangul shapes. Having that first month to work in-person was very helpful to make some early design decisions.”

Modern Hangul is composed of 24 letters that were designed to be written in syllabic blocks that fit within a square system. Concepts of yin & yang and human, sky & earth are integral to the design. The language is notable because it was designed as a complete phonetic alphabet system in the 15th century, as opposed to languages whose letterforms evolved over long periods of time. Notably, the original Hangul design was a sans serif before moving into script-based designs.

There’s a distinction between designing shapes required for a particular language system and designing them well. There’s a further distinction between designing these components to work well within the same script, and designing them to sit harmoniously alongside other scripts that have fundamental differences in design. Even to a layperson, Hangul and Latin are very obviously different. Minjoo’s initial challenge was to find the right place to begin. “I started the design process by sketching keywords and basic characters that have the “ㅁ” letterform. Once I finished the “ㅁ”set, I expanded upon the design of the remaining character set based on those designs.”

“After the full character set was completed, I designed the letter spacing,” says Minjoo. This became the biggest challenge. Since Hangul characters are composed of three parts, there were many gaps of varying irregular size, which meant that it wasn’t possible to create a convenient system of extrapolation. This meant that Minjoo had to make manual adjustments across the set. “I had to make sure that the spaces were even and consistent across all letter combinations. The first words I successfully put together were ‘샤프한글’; ‘샤프’ means ‘sharp’ and ‘한글’ is ‘Hangul’ in Korean.”

Once the spacing was complete, Minjoo began unifying features between the two scripts. The main aesthetic consideration was the characteristics of Sharp Grotesk’s curves. “The atmosphere between the two scripts had to be alike. We wanted to make sure that the curves in Sharp Grotesk Hangul were made consistent with those of its Latin counterpart.”

Conclusion
Every good contemporary typeface is an amalgamation: of invention and homage, the contemporary and the timeless, human feeling and machine perfection. Taste is essential, but so is good judgment and technique. The original Latin release of Sharp Grotesk has the Swiss spirit in its texture, but idiosyncratic details in the letterforms impart a warmth that sets it apart from so many other contemporary neo-grotesks, and its wide variety of width and weight make it endlessly versatile.
Its variety now extends into new territory and is an ongoing exploration. The world of multi-script type design is still fresh. As such, there’s a responsibility for type designers to establish organic processes that respect the principles of individual native scripts while progressing the design language. Harmonizing these different scripts under a single family has been anything but mechanical or systemized, and the time spent developing these processes reflects our due diligence. Every shape and proportion has been scrutinized while the overall impression is one of absolute ease. By the same token, we had to wait until the right moment to make our first variable font. While the original blueprint of Sharp Grotesk has been practically recontextualized with these extensions, Sharp Grotesk Global exists in these combined worlds while retaining the sturdy yet playful feel that has made it so singular.
Sharp FM Record Slip Mat for SG Global
Our newest addition to Sharp Type Things: a double-sided Sharp FM vinyl slip mat that also functions as a type specimen for Sharp Grotesk. It features the unofficial Sharp FM slogan “Talk less, listen more” spiraling outward in all five scripts on Side A; Side B has our Sharp Grotesk Globe graphic.

Credits
Type Director: Lucas Sharp
SG Latin Design: Lucas Sharp with Greg Gazdowicz, Wei Huang, Chantra Malee & Octavio Pardo
Specimen: Lucas Sharp, Chantra Malee
SG Greek Design: Jovana Jocic with Kostas Riginos
Specimen: Kostas Riginos
SG Cyrillic Design: Maria Doreuli & Lucas Sharp with Jovana Jocic & Connor Davenport
Specimen: Jovana Jocic
SG Hangul Design: Minjoo Ham & Lucas Sharp
Specimen: Jae Ee and Sangah Shin
SG Thai Design: Cadson Demak with Calvin Kwok & Lucas Sharp
Specimen: Cadson Demak
Latin Kerning: Lucas Sharp
Greek + Cyrillic Kerning: Igino Marino
Mastering: Connor Davenport
Specimen Producer: My-Lan Thuong
SG Variable Engineering: Connor Davenport
984 total styles
V.1 Oct 2016
V.2 Oct 2019
V.3 Mar 2023