My take on a thin sans.

It should cover all Western European languages (plus Hawaiian and Hepburn romanisation).

First pass at light kerning done, will be refined with use.

Every printable character in the strict 7-bit ASCII set, with handy decimal, octal and binary numerical codes attached (no hexadcimal, as it involves letters ;-)

Inspired by a type identification request over at Typography.guru.

During developement, the tool has taken over, also helped by the scarcity of letters available in the original, making the design more sans than serif, and with strong MICR vibes in some places.

The name means "shoe shop" (also shoe repair or shoe making) in Italian.

At the moment the language coverage is limited to Western Europe.

A little experiment with the "connect" bricks (and an healty dose of stacking). I wasn't referencing any specific example of the style (of which there are many), but I'm sure that, looking for solutions as I went, I ended up with something similar to already existing typefaces (and fontstructions).

Unfortunately, some connecting bricks don't align exactly, so I had to resort to approximate them, when possible, with more stacking, which didn't particularly help the already lacking consistency in construction.

But enough moaning, enjoy!

An earlier (1926) constructed alphabet from Jan Tschichold, based on a somewhat finer grid and a slightly less condensed uppercase and a bolder appearance overall.

With a caps-height of 17, reproducing some diagonals proved quickly to be between nightmarish and impossible, thus the fidelity is a bit less exact than my previous recreation.

For a digitisation that encompass both designs and offers proper alternates, you can look at Peter Wiegel’s Tschichold.

A very quick & dirt job prompted by this thread on Typophile.

I started this... more than eleven years ago (!), and changed directions at least a couple of times along the way, so perhaps it would have been better to start from scratch.

Anyway, I thought it would be an appropriate typeface for the holiday season :-)

My version of Jan Tschichold’s “Schmale Grotesk - Leicht und schnell konstruierbare Schrift” (narrow grotesque - font that is easy and quick to construct), from 1930.

Turns out it isn’t always “quick and easy” to translate a pen and straightedge approach to constructed letters into Fontstruct’s prefabricated bricks setting.

In expanding the glyph coverage, I tried to remain true to the spirit of the original self imposed limitations, both in terms of grid (e.g. the cramped space for the uppercase diacritics), and of tools (see the solution for  superscripts et similia).

The font covers all of Google Fonts Basic set and, given the c-caron present in the source, all of Czech orthography. I may try to add other Eastern European languages in the future.

There are many different takes on the same source (including for the visual identity of a museum), you can look at Serious, here on Fontstruct, or at Iwan Reschniev, for an extensive expansion in weights and typographic features.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome :-)

See also Quick and Easy and New.

A completely unoriginal typeface, that make up for its complete lack of personality with an equally complete lack of consistency.

Enjoy.