FF Legato supports up to 76 different languages such as Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, French, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Kurdish (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.
“Legato” is a musical term, meaning that the notes are played in a “connected” manner. This idea of connecting discrete units to enhance overall expression can be applied to the letters setting a text in precisely the same way. In designing FF Legato, Evert Bloemsma studied the extent to which the characters of the alphabet visually connect and build proper word and line images, then setting out to improve these connections by means of diagonal stress. The contrast between thick and thin leads the reader’s eye from one character to the next, and this improves the reading experience. Most sans serifs are built using basic geometric shapes, like Futura – even those built using classical proportions, like Gill Sans. But this approach proves tiring in long texts. FF Legato abandons the idea of a sans serif typeface that consists of simple rigid forms. The design was selected as one of the best typefaces of the first decade of the 21st century by the ATypI in their Letter.2 competition in 2011.
