Mala Regular

Bold Monday

Mala

Vandertak Regular

CakeType

Vandertak

Whale Regular

Whale

Barbara Bigosińska is a typographer (MA, Katowice, PL) and type designer (MA). She graduated from the Type and Media (KABK, The Hague) in 2013, with final project Mala Type Family. Ever since then, she has been working in her profession designing numerous beautiful layouts as well as offering type design services for international clients such as Bold Monday, Indian Type Foundry, and Google.

Family: Mala

Vandertak immortalizes a piece of Dutch cultural heritage in typographic form. In 2013, Pieter digitized the capitals spelling out “Holland Amerika Lijn” on the facade of the famous Hotel New York in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The lettering was commissioned in 1916 by Christiaan Bonifacius van der Tak, who worked on the extension of the Holland Amerika Lijn building. At first glance, it seems as if the typeface has a reversed contrast. But this is not the case. Because the original lettering was applied so high on the building, the horizontals were made heavier to avoid having them look too thin when viewed from the ground level. These optical corrections give Vandertak its recognizable appearance. Vandertak comes in seven styles and supports Latin Extended and Cyrillic. See the PDF specimen for the complete character set and OpenType feature overviews.

Belying its evocative name, Whale is a delicate, elegant design. Available in a single thin weight, this wide monospaced typeface exhibits fluid forms referencing the giant Cetacea’s graceful motions through the ocean waters. Like its namesake, Whale’s generous width takes up all the space it needs. Preceding a capital letter by a parenthesis and a hyphen generates double-wide swash capitals thanks to built-in OpenType wizardry. Alternate characters with emphasized ball terminals and large quotation marks add to the design’s playfulness. No one said the typewriter genre needs to be bland and businesslike. Whale comes in one style and supports Latin Extended, including Vietnamese.