A little bit DB, a little bit Forza

Posted by cdavidson in

General Discussions

10 Sep 2010 — 2:38pm

Hi all,
I love the work Eden Spiekermann did with the DB house font (http://edenspiekermann.com/en/work/projects/deutsche-bahn). One might even go as far to say that I would travel to Germany just to see it in use. But I was wondering whether there were any "alternatives" (specifically to the sans-serif face)? By "alternatives" I don't mean copies, but rather faces that follow a similar set of principles. For instance, I would consider Forza (http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100041) by Hoefler & Frere-Jones to be along similar lines... it's refined, quite "square", the wonderful way that strokes meet vertical strokes by thinning etc etc.

Is there anything that springs to mind?

Many thanks.

Si_Daniels
10 Sep 2010 — 2:42pm

As I recall the font was designed on Arial's metrics, which probably puts it in the "unusual" category. Probably not what you're looking for but Liberation Sans, Ascender Sans and Albany had the same constraint.

Reed Reibstein
10 Sep 2010 — 3:08pm

From one of the designers, Christian Schwartz's Amplitude, in its normal width, has a bit of the same flavor. Mostly from the shared characteristic of emphasized inktraps.

mrschwartz
10 Sep 2010 — 3:19pm

Only the Office version of DB Sans used Arial's metrics, and this was added almost a year after the rest was completed. I really wanted them to get a Mono instead, which looked cool but was a bit too eccentric for intra-corporate correspondence...

DB Sans shares some DNA with FF Unit, which started as an earlier attempt by Erik Spiekermann and I at the DB corporate face. Fred Smeijers's wonderful Fresco Sans has a similar eccentricity in the terminals, (but not to quite the sale level of weirdness) and the underlying structure is much rounder.

Si_Daniels
10 Sep 2010 — 3:26pm

>Only the Office version of DB Sans used Arial's metrics

Cool. Thanks for the info.

riccard0
10 Sep 2010 — 3:39pm