Just around the corner from where I live in Berlin is a big street, an architectural ensemble, of imposing residential buildings and associated shops — a monument of the so called Zuckerbäckerstil (Socialist classicism).The whole thing was built in the late 50s and 60s, after the area was destroyed in WW2. At this time, the small number of neon signs adorning the blocks of flats and shops were part of the architectural concept and carefully designed.

FF Attribute is a type family of seven weights and an extended character set. The typeface comes in a monospaced version and a non-monospaced version.

In 2015, while working on a little side project, I spent a lot of time in the code editor instead of, as usual, in Photoshop or InDesign. I tried out many of the available monospaced fonts. The last years have seen something of a revival of this genre, probably because of the fact that coding and programming have become more and more common and widespread, including among designers.

I started experimenting with my own monospaced…

How many characters does a font include? Who designed it? Which version is it? What about the copyright? Font files can be highly complex and very large files, with many glyphs, supporting dozens of languages, rich in features — or they can be very small, containing just a few icons for a website.

In 2016 I worked for a big publishing house in Germany and helped to structure and handle the use of all their fonts and font files. One problem we had to deal with was making sure different versions of font files were consistent and checking what every…