Special characters – Futura®100 /// We asked the designers of the Futura®100 first release what their favourite glyphs were to design. Their answers were surprising, often idiosyncratic, and always thoughtful.
What’s your favourite Futura®100 character? Try them all out on our website (link in bio).
#typography #fonts #graphicdesign #multilingual #beautiful
As part of our ongoing #GRANSHAN community series, we’re pleased to feature @sovichet - one of the most influential figures in Khmer type design today.
Starting as a self-taught designer in 2010, Sovichet turned his passion into a profession in 2018. Since then, he has created both open-source and custom typefaces for global and local clients such as Google, Grab, Xiaomi, Carlsberg Group, Peng Huoth Group, Cadson Demak, Typotheque, and TypeTogether.
Beyond design, Sovichet develops toolchains for testing and proofing complex scripts like Khmer and Myanmar, and actively contributes to Cambodia’s creative scene through writing, workshops, and talks on Khmer typography — helping nurture a growing community around the script.
A small detail, perhaps, but one that makes me happy about Futura 100 Myanmar, is the inclusion of numerals for Pa’O and Eastern Pwo languages.
Scripts are a cultural repository — the way that people shape their words and ideas reflects not only the tools, techniques and technologies with which they write, but expresses something of their history, their identity and their connections with or differences from other ethnic groups.
In 2020–21 I started noticing in Facebook posts some characters that I didn’t recognise, characters which from the context must have been numerals for Pa’O and Eastern Pwo, two Karen languages used in their homeland of Eastern Burma as well as by the diaspora worldwide.
After digging around for enough attestations, I wrote a Unicode proposal to get these numerals encoded; the proposal was accepted and the numerals made it into Unicode 16 in 2024.
That means with their own numerals now digitally enabled, Karen communities don’t have to resort to borrowing Western numerals, Burmese numerals or anything else.
Things now come full circle as Futura 100 Myanmar is likely the first retail font to include these newly encoded characters.
Futura®100 Myanmar /// Designed by José Scaglione (@josescaglione ) & Veronika Burian (@vikosch_b ) & Sovichet Tep (@sovichet ) & Ben Mitchell (@ohbendy ) & Paul Renner, Futura®100 Myanmar is a family constructed of rational forms and balanced by slight warmth for multiscript design.
Writing in a Facebook post, Ben Mitchell said that in translating Futura® to the Myanmar script, “we were lucky that the purest form of the script is already geometric, which meant the overall functionality/readability wouldn’t suffer in this style. Our aim was to find the definitive expression of each letterform through geometry, though in typeface design ‘geometry’ necessarily means using all sorts of optical trickery: making things look the same means they have to be mathematically different.”
Find out more about Futura®100 Myanmar on our website (link in comments).
#typography #fonts #graphicdesign #myanmar
Futura®100 Khmer /// Type designers Sovichet Tep (@sovichet ) & José Scaglione (@josescaglione ) & Veronika Burian (@vikosch_b ) have created Futura®100 Khmer, a contemporary loopless family for today’s digital tools and multiscript use. Futura®100 Khmer features six upright and six oblique styles, plus two variable fonts for even more versatility.
Futura®100 Khmer is part of the first release, which also includes Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Lao, Latin, PanAfrican Latin, Thai (these ten with obliques), Arabic, and Myanmar. Futura®100 has been created by TypeTogether in partnership with Bauer Types, and it is available for purchase now from our web store (link in bio).
#typography #fonts #graphicdesign #Khmer
Marking our 6th year of running @anagata.design , we started the studio mainly due to our shared goal of wanting to see better design work in Cambodia, specifically in the fields of logo design, brand identity, typography, and type design. At the time we felt that the design work we saw coming out of the country often lacked awareness for proper design fundamentals and principles.
Now 6 years in, we can confidently say that we are on the right track, making one slow but firm step at a time. This year particularly has been quite validating, seeing the fruits from seeds we’ve planted years ago.
It’s good to celebrate the wins along the way, whether big or small, but the wins are not the goal for us, they are simply indicators that we are on the right track, our goal is to see long lasting impact.
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#anagata #design #anagatadesign #cambodia #graphicdesign #designer #branding #typedesigner #typedesign #typography
Nice try placing the subjoint and the below mark horizontally to save space and to avoid the collision. But it doesn't look like a good choice (ប្ដូរ confusingly becomes ប្ដរូ). Maybe change to another typeface that has a lower base height. Or adjust the placement of those marks to the left a bit. The Latin looks stretched though? Or maybe need a better handling on how texts are placed on the wayfinding board.
This may seems like a small point, but this kind of detail in typography for wayfinding and information design is very crucial.
