Ajay Kumar Duraiswamy
Alexandra Schwarzwald
Alexandra Schwarzwald
Alexandra Schwarzwald
FF Hertz supports up to 83 different languages such as Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, French, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Kurdish (Latin), Azerbaijani (Latin), Romanian, Dutch, Hungarian, Czech, Serbian (Latin), Kazakh (Latin), Swedish, Belarusian (Latin), Croatian, Slovak, Finnish, Danish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slovenian, Irish, Estonian, Basque, Icelandic, and Luxembourgian in Latin and other scripts.
Please note that not all languages are available for all formats.
Low stroke contrast, generous spacing, and fine-grained weights from Light to Extra Bold make FF Hertz a workhorse text typeface which holds up well under today’s widely varying output conditions from print to screen. The quite dark Book style works well on e-ink displays which usually tend to thin out letters, as well as in print when you want to evoke the solid letter image of the hot-metal type era. Two sizes of Small Caps are included: A larger size for abbreviations and acronyms, and a smaller size matching the height of the lowercase letters.
FF Hertz is a uniwidth design, that means each letter occupies the same space in all weights. This feature allows the user to switch between weights (but not between Roman and Italic styles) without text reflow.
Jens Kutílek began work on FF Hertz in 2012. From a drawing exercise on a low-resolution grid (a technique proposed by Tim Ahrens to avoid fiddling with details too early), it soon evolved into a bigger project combining a multitude of influences which up until that point had only been floating around in his head, including his mother’s 1970s typewriter with its wonderful numbers, Hermann Zapf’s Melior as well as his forgotten Mergenthaler Antiqua (an interpretation of the Modern genre), and old German cartographic lettering styles.
Kutílek likes to imagine FF Hertz used in scientific books or for an edition of Lovecraftian horror stories.
