Push

he design of Push echoes the letterforms of the first one hundred years of sans serifs yet carries its own weight in a very contemporary manner. Its bold condensed, crossbar-less capital ‘G’ takes inspiration from Thorowgood’s 1830 Seven-Line Grotesque, while the lowercase ‘a’ follows in the same vein as Plak from 1930. A character set that features a looped Anglo-American ‘g’ in addition to a Grotesk two-storey ‘g’ and an open-sloped ‘Danish g’ adds to this mixed background from the Old and the New World.

Instead of sweeping through the family in a massive interpolation operation, designer Christine Gertsch began to work on the extreme widths of the bold weights in order to remain in full control of the curvature and to avoid too much compromise.

The intentional change in curvature across Push’s widths and weights is a key feature of its anatomy. A transformation that is visible throughout the family from subtle, but tense curves in the extra-condensed and extra-light weight at one end to massively confident extra-wide and extra-bold styles at the other. Almost naturally, Push Regular maintains a level-headed and calm posture between these extremes.

The transitional behaviour of Push creates contrast within the family not just by width and weight, but by shape and counter-shape. This is an intriguing feature that comes in handy in every complex typographic system on any medium. As a visual side effect of these characteristics, a Stylistic Set allows accents and punctuation marks to dance around the main characters in a slightly lighter fashion.

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