Sharp Grotesk Global

Sharp Grotesk Global contains an entire universe within itself. With its massive system of weights and widths, it’s our most comprehensive Latin typeface and also represents our first multi-script release, with extensions in Greek, Cyrillic, Hangul, and Thai. Finally, a Latin variable font rounds out the collection. What began as a hand-drawn lettering poster in 2011 is arguably our most versatile typeface, endlessly adaptable and scalable.
Lucas Sharp’s monument to Adrian Frutiger sits at the intersection of modernist rigor and hand-drawn vernacular, where Swiss styling collides with the unexpected construction and wonky imperfectionism of 20th-century American wood type. The original Latin release is notable for its 7 weights and 21 widths in roman and italic styles. This variety lends the typeface an incredible range of moods, making it endlessly adaptable and scalable on a cross axis of weight, width, and now variable font technology and an expansive language extension.

From the start, we wanted to achieve a harmony of texture, rhythm, and form across these script localizations, rather than enforcing any sort of superficial aesthetic uniformity. Over the last four years, we’ve worked on Greek, Cyrillic, Thai, and Hangul versions of Sharp Grotesk with native type designers. This means that components were developed from the native script and then adapted to the aesthetics and construction of Sharp Grotesk. The balancing act here was to ensure a strong historical and cultural understanding of the native scripts while not shying away from pushing boundaries and creating new forms. These energetic interpretations sit together beautifully on the same page and also succeed as independent typefaces, achieving a cultural and aesthetic harmony across this globe-spanning superfamily.