Luca Pellegrini took on the modern look and re-drew the letterforms, interrupted by subtle spaces where thick and thin strokes meet.

This mix is a child of its time and seems to reflect the Swiss and Italian biography of Schawinski. In 1932, Xanti Schawinsky (1904–1979) designed an alphabet that combines two styles: a neo-classic stroke contrast paired with characteristics of stencil lettering. Zimbardi lends the face even more character by carefully adding round terminals in subtle spots of the alphabet, accessible through stylistic sets. Joschmi overcomes legibility issues usually associated with this stencil style, with special attention to the design of white space. From just six original letterforms (a, b, c, d, e, g), Flavia Zimbardi completed Schmidt’s draft and extended it to a full character set for contemporary use, adding upper case letters and different figure sets including old-style. These modular shapes simply consist of half circles, quarter circles and square strokes with half-round terminals. Joost Schmidt’s (1893–1948) name is undoubtedly connected with monolinear condensed letters of geometric appearance – his unfinished draft of a stencil alphabet, constructed on grid paper in 1930, is much lesser known.

True to the original, Yamasaki captured the wobbly contour in CarlMarx, preserving warmth in the condensed geometric style of the early 1930s. As suggested by Marx, Yamasaki captured two weights from the original drawing and perfectly adjusted light and bold to highlight words and create hierarchy in headlines – without losing or adding space. A set of hanging figures, alternates for some critical letterforms (such as f, r, and t) as well as several ligatures make CarlMarx especially suitable for use in body text. Hidetaka Yamasaki redrew the letters from scratch and added all missing characters for today’s needs. Although the letter proportions are based on Schmidt’s teachings, the forms are not constructed from compass and ruler, but drawn with brush and marker, lending the words a warm and lively touch. This typeface is based on lettering by Carl Marx (1911–1991), designed during his first semester at the Bauhaus in Joost Schmidt’s class, in 1932.

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