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Solange Knowles
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Aus-Rotten Graveworm
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Freddie Jackson Peaches & Herb
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Godspeed! You Black Emperor Tony Oladipo Allen, Drummer
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Seagulls Insane And Swans Deceased Mining Out The Void Miles! The Definitive Miles Davis At Montreux Collection
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Danza II: Electric Boogaloo, Black Market Activities, 2007 The Herbie Hancock Trio with Ron Carter & Tony Williams
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Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack & More History of the Grateful Dead Volume One Bear’s Choice
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All Along the Watchtower, Burning of the Midnight Lamp My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair, But Now
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The Next Episode feat Snoop Dogg, Kurupt & Nate Dogg More Stories Are Told Today, Sorry They Washed Away
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Charles Bradley, Black Velvet & The Initial Recordings Tell Me What To Do,The Tank Is Dry, This Wheel Is Flat

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.

14 styles, 21 widths, 294 total fonts.

Sharp Grotesk Global

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.

Overview

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’.

Grid

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.

N A Diagram

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.

5 10 15 20 25

Variable Font Construction

In the winter of 2022, Connor Davenport began engineering a Sharp Grotesk variable font after years spent developing the workflow and tools to produce font files in this relatively new format. Given Sharp Grotesk’s wide spectrum of weights and widths, it was the logical evolution for the typeface.

In 2016, when Lucas originally published Sharp Grotesk, he designed it as a “variable static” font. The original 21 widths gave the user an extraordinary range of options to determine how headlines fit into a text block. Now, in 2023, the technology is finally at a place where we felt comfortable developing Lucas’ original idea into a true variable designspace.

“A variable font is like a normal OpenType font, but they have what we call ‘OpenType Variations’ features. These features contain bits of information that are embedded in the font to instruct the way each glyph’s points should move along any given axis,” says Connor. This variable font has 3 axes: weight, width, and slant. The weight ranges from 250 – 900, corresponding to the static family’s current weight structure. The width also follows the original structure of going from 05 – 25. We have also included a slant axis, ranging from 0 – 10, with each number corresponding to a degree of slant. 

“When drawing a typeface family, typically we use interpolation in the production phase to produce static instances between our sources, e.g. a Medium weight can be generated from a Thin and Black weight,” says Connor. “With a VF, this interpolation happens on the user's end via a design application with sliders. Practically, this minimizes the font’s overall file size, saving crucial space; in the case of Sharp Grotesk Latin, we see savings of around 2000%, going from 294 files to 1.”

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.

two up sl

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


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