Sharp Type

Sharp Grotesk Global contains an entire universe within itself. 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 massive 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 extensions, 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.

Korean type and graphic designer Minjoo Ham began working with Lucas on Sharp Grotesk Hangul in 2019. For the first month of the design process, Minjoo was invited to work in-person with the Sharp Type team, who were then based in Madrid. The standard character set took a year to complete. “I was sketching and digitizing Hangul during this time and was able to discuss certain details with Lucas in person,” says Minjoo. “He suggested design directions and even drew some of the Hangul shapes. Having that first month to work in-person was very helpful to make some early design decisions.”

Modern Hangul is composed of 24 letters that were designed to be written in syllabic blocks that fit within a square system. Concepts of yin & yang and human, sky & earth are integral to the design. The language is notable because it was designed as a complete phonetic alphabet system in the 15th century, as opposed to languages whose letterforms evolved over long periods of time. Notably, the original Hangul design was a sans serif before moving into script-based designs. 

There’s a distinction between designing shapes required for a particular language system and designing them well. There’s a further distinction between designing these components to work well within the same script, and designing them to sit harmoniously alongside other scripts that have fundamental differences in design. Even to a layperson, Hangul and Latin are very obviously different. Minjoo’s initial challenge was to find the right place to begin. “I started the design process by sketching keywords and basic characters that have the “ㅁ” letterform. Once I finished the “ㅁ”set, I expanded upon the design of the remaining character set based on those designs.”

“After the full character set was completed, I designed the letter spacing,” says Minjoo. This became the biggest challenge. Since Hangul characters are composed of three parts, there were many gaps of varying irregular size, which meant that it wasn’t possible to create a convenient system of extrapolation. This meant that Minjoo had to make manual adjustments across the set. “I had to make sure that the spaces were even and consistent across all letter combinations. The first words I successfully put together were ‘샤프한글’; ‘샤프’ means ‘sharp’ and ‘한글’ is ‘Hangul’ in Korean.” 

Once the spacing was complete, Minjoo began unifying features between the two scripts. The main aesthetic consideration was the characteristics of Sharp Grotesk’s curves. “The atmosphere between the two scripts had to be alike. We wanted to make sure that the curves in Sharp Grotesk Hangul were made consistent with those of its Latin counterpart.”