Tausend

rom the architecture of the two-story a, type designers create the blueprint for a complete alphabet: contrast, arch, angle, stroke, finial and the counters define the DNA of a typeface. No wonder that a very special ‘a’ became the seed for the new Tausend Font Collection.

About three years ago, while designing his typeface Tresor, Christoph Koeberlin sketched a very special and particular a. It took a more straightforward and clean design direction and found itself in the tradition of German grotesque typefaces, but retained an anarchistic core: the slight overhang, the gentle top-heaviness, the minimal contrast, the smile and wink in the curves. It was these promising details that Koeberlin later wanted to explore.

He ended up doing this together with type designer Gabriel Richter. They had met a few years earlier, while Richter was working as an intern at FontShop International in Berlin. He has since published FontFont Infra (2019) and other fonts under his own label, nice to type. Based in Fukuoka, Japan, Richter has become an expert in geometric sans serifs and can always be counted on to bring a sense of surprise and delight in this field.

Koeberlin on Richter: “I really appreciate the open collaboration with Gabriel. And his fonts are totally cool and innovative.” Richter on Koeberlin: “Christoph is a master of precision work. When it comes to breaking the rules, we are on the same wavelength.” Because the two understand each other so well and complement each other, they quickly found a development path for Tausend. First, Richter tried out different directions from the a.

“You can only judge a design course if you follow it consistently,” is how he describes his role as the driving force behind the project. Very quickly they came to the same realization that the “roundness” would be a distinctive strength of the typeface and that this would make Tausend refreshingly modern.

As the process continued, Koeberlin further modified the stroke width of masters and metrics several times, which Richter then transferred to the character groups, taking into account suggestions for the design of accents and special characters. They were just as meticulous when it came to the language expansion of the typeface by making sure it was in accordance with the new version of DIN 91379 from 2022. DIN 91379 stands for “Characters and defined character sequences in Unicode for the electronic processing of names and data exchange in Europe”, which, loosely translated, means: According to this standard, a font covers all official EU languages, as well as the official languages of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland plus German minority languages. Tausend conforms to this standard and so is suitable for authorities, organizations and brands that want to communicate accessibly in the “Western world”. The importance of the standard is growing and it is currently being developed into the European DIN EN 00224284 standard.

In this context, companies and their design teams often ask themselves: Does the appearance of the typeface also integrate well? Christoph Koeberlin has the right answer when describing the personality of Tausend: “Our new typeface is brutally honest, proud and confident. If that is what brands or products are, they will find the right team player in Tausend. As a reminder: ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’. It is not enough to put your own values ​​and demands into the world at some point… they need to be lived continuously. Especially in design.”

The fact that the development of Tausend progressed quickly, despite the time difference between Koeberlin’s and Richter’s desks (Berlin, Germany – Fukuoka, Japan), is amazing. Richter: “I gave Christoph the latest files every day shortly before work and he did the same 12 hours later. So we halved the development time without getting stressed.”

The name of Christoph Koeberlin and Gabriel Richter’s new type family says a lot about its quality. It stands for size and diversity, for abundance and potential: a thousand ideas, a thousand possibilities, a thousand reasons. It makes texts mysterious (“One Thousand and One Nights”) and titles a hit: “Thousand Miles”. Tausend sets milestones: a thousand glyphs, a thousand languages, a thousand kerning pairs.

The font is a multi-talent, a universal genius, a jack of all trades. And Tausend was also the zip code of Berlin, the city where the designers met at a time when neutral grotesques with low stroke contrast were at the height of their popularity.

Originally, because of their reduced form, they were used for occasional printed materials, advertising and signage. With the appearance of the reader-friendly Akzidenz-Grotesk in Berlin in 1898, they were also used as bread-and-butter type, i.e. for bulk typesetting. Half a century later, AG was the inspiration for Helvetica (1957) and countless other imitation typefaces, and is considered the basis for what is still the most popular font genre.

According to the classification standard DIN 16518, such typefaces are assigned to the “sans serif linear antiqua” category. If one wants to categorize it according to the principle of form, it is a “static grotesque”. As the demands on typefaces have increased in the digital age and both taste and technology have changed, static grotesques also need to be reinvented. Tausend is leading the way here, because it is not looking back but forward by giving up a small part of its static nature. Thanks to variable font technology, Tausend is not being launched with nine weights from Thin to Black, but with… that’s right, 1000, including 100 extra-bold weights marked with the label “Too Black” (a treasure trove for anarchists and avant-gardists). If you want to develop your typographic concept in a classic way, you will find the familiar, static style designations Thin, Light, Regular, Medium and so on in the font menu, ten in total.

Another practical function of Tausend are the optical sizes. They improve the reading quality and impact of different text sizes, from small print and typesetting to title typesetting and poster design. You no longer have to worry about the manual finishing of a text, such as percentage increases or decreases in running width. With Tausend, everything is already coordinated, not only the spacing, but also the letter shapes and their relationship to each other. For example, the counters open up for small font sizes, while the details in the shapes of Tausend Plakat (German: Poster) become more visible for larger sizes, this is most clearly recognizable in the capital W. The optical size is denser and more compact than the basic version, complemented by a lower contrast, smaller apertures, narrower spacing, accents that end with the cap height and ascenders, as well as more unpolished forms.

Parallel to the “classic” Tausend with the optical size of Plakat, there is Tausend Soft, the first large static grotesque family with discreetly rounded corners, which has been developed in the same way. These fonts were originally designed for media and situations in which the edges of the letters are affected, such as on television screens or backlit signs. Sharp fonts then become dull and unpredictable and the appearance of such texts differs from the printed typeface. This is why the corners were ground off from the outset. Today, there are different types of media that require indestructible fonts – smart watches are just one example.

Two other versions of Tausend are aimed at use in larger sizes. The elegant stencil version is reminiscent of the AG Book Stencil, designed by Günter Gerhard Lange in 1985, which is no longer available digitally. Tausend Stencil was also developed as a variable font with two axes, one of which offers 800 weights whose gaps or bars can be widened or narrowed in 40 steps via the second axis.

The fourth sub-family is called Tausend Shaded, a grotesque with nine static weights (and 205 variable weights), whose shadows adapt visually to the weight and can be understood as a further homage to AG, namely to its first appearance under the name “Schattierte Grotesk” in 1895. Tausend Shaded was Gabriel Richter’s responsibility: “It was one of the biggest challenges in my professional career,” the type designer emphasizes: “The growing shadows really got on my nerves.”

But the work was worth it. This fourth style adds an unusual option for striking purposes to the Tausend Collection, which requires just as much skill to use as it does to produce. Best of all, you can now try out all the variants for yourself with our free demo fonts, which are identical in scope and function to the normal versions except for the currency symbols. Because we want to encourage you to experiment, you can also order the full Shaded version free of charge in the Base License for 1 user, 10,000 web pageviews per month and 10,000 social media followers.

Try Tausend

Try Tausend

Helvetica, Akzidenz-Grotesk, AG Book and AG are registered trademarks of Monotype Imaging Inc.