New Rubrik and its sibling New Rubrik Edge stand out in the typographic firmament. Miles Newlyn drew a sans serif with simplified letterforms by eliminating the spurs—the little extensions where curved strokes meet stems. The clean junctions lend the typefaces a sleek, modern look popular in branding, packaging, wayfinding, and environmental graphics—any situation calling for a forward-thinking typographic style. New Rubrik combines the best of both worlds: its techy, futuristic appearance is softened by rounded stroke endings, making it warm and personable. New Rubrik Edge was designed by request to be the somewhat cooler and more technical companion of New Rubrik. While the Edge styles bear square stroke endings, Newlyn kept corners blunt and slightly bulbous to maintain the flavor of the original design.

Both New Rubrik and New Rubrik Edge’s linguistic range have expanded significantly with the addition of Cyrillic, potentially making the families accessible to a quarter of a billion additional users. Newlyn brought Alexei Vanyashin on board to collaborate on the project; Leo Philp provided technical assistance. Vanyashin expertly tapped into Newlyn’s artistic vision to create a comprehensive Cyrillic counterpart to the existing Latin alphabet. Both New Rubrik and New Rubrik Edge now support all languages written in the Cyrillic script, including language-specific forms and Newlyn’s signature Accessibility Set.

But the new New Rubrik and New Rubrik Edge are about much more than language expansions. The technical improvements resulting from Type Network’s relentless quality assurance process represent an equally important part of this release. All fonts coming to Type Network are rigorously tested by Jill Pichotta, assisted by David Jonathan Ross and CJ Dunn. The QA process helps to reveal design flaws and technical hiccups, and Pichotta’s analysis inspired Newlyn to revisit the two families. This entailed not only a complete redraw—changing the x-heights and cap heights, and adjusting ascenders and descenders—but also respacing and rekerning all of the fonts. Newlyn also decided to make tabular numerals the default figure style, having discovered that most users preferred them. “I invested the time, because it’s a fairly unique design in the marketplace. Very few typefaces come close,” Newlyn said. Like all Newlyn fonts, New Rubrik and New Rubrik Edge are available for print, web, applications, and ePub licensing. Webfonts may be tested free for thirty days. To stay current on all things Newlyn, subscribe to Type Network News, our occasional email newsletter featuring font releases, foundry happenings, type and design events, and more.