About Sharp Grotesk
Sharp Grotesk Global is Sharp Type’s largest superfamily to date. It’s our most comprehensive Latin typeface, with twelve weights and seven widths in Roman and Italic styles. Sharp Grotesk now 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. It’s the culmination of years of work, and it’s a prelude for what’s to come at Sharp Type.
Sharp Grotesk Thai includes: 6 weights, 11 widths, 66 total fonts
About Sharp Grotesk
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.
Latin Construction
Like Frutiger’s Univers, Sharp Grotesk spans the gamut of width and weight and explores the edges of what is possible in sans-serif typography, organizing the resulting family by width and weight using a numeric system of style naming. The Latin superfamily consists of 14 roman/italic pairs. The style names correspond with a number: 05 - 25, which represents the 21 widths of Sharp Grotesk. For example: the narrowest and boldest font in the family is ‘Sharp Grotesk Black Italic - 05’. The thinnest and widest font in the family is ‘Sharp Grotesk Thin - 25’.
Within the Latin family, different width and weight ranges are optimized for different optical sizes. The 20s are the most standard widths and a good starting point for designers in terms of overall utility. The extremes on either end of both the width and weight axes of the spectrum tend to require display setting, with the ultra-narrow 05 widths and the tightly-packed Black weights requiring the largest display settings.
Immediately noticeable features are the affably wonky nods to the wood type era, such as the highly swashy ear of the “g” and the curvaceous leg of the “R”. The character of the typeface shines through the construction of its letterforms, which transition from a capsule-based letter shape found in the more condensed widths, which gradually transform toward the fully round shapes in the 20-25 widths. Ink traps—a strange feature for a typeface so informed by wood type—are useful in optimizing both large and mid range optical sizes in different ways. In the mid to thin widths, they help maintain texture and legibility at smaller sizes. In the tightly-packed Black weight, they facilitate the hairline negative space that defines the letters.
Thai Construction
In January of 2019, Sharp Type began work on Sharp Grotesk Thai with Cadson Demak, a renowned Thai design studio and type foundry based in Bangkok. In the end, it took 32 weeks to complete the project. Thai is an Abugida writing system distinct from alphabets like Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin. While it is read left-to-right, consonants and vowels form segmented units, with the vowel always secondary to its consonant partner. It has 44 consonants and some 20 vowels and tone marks. Thai is not a common script extension, but it’s an homage to studio founder Chantra Malee’s heritage. For both of these reasons, SG Thai has a special place in the world of Sharp Grotesk Global. Cadson Demak’s design director, Smich Smanloh, and designer Promphan Suksumek were tasked with finding a drawing solution to match the family construction of Sharp Grotesk, and this was challenging for several reasons.
Thai typefaces typically do not have the wide weight and width system of SG Latin since the script has so many details within the letterforms. This made translating the darkest weights and thinnest widths—the Blacks and 05s—a challenge. “This not only required a lot of visual corrections to be done to maintain the legibility but also required us to make unique design decisions with some letters.” The team at Cadson determined that they could design Thai analogs to SG Latin’s 15-25 width range and all but the darkest Black weight.
Thai only has a single case height since there are no capitals or lower case; generally, this unicase bouma sits somewhere in between the corresponding Latin upper and lower case letterforms. A unique feature of Sharp Grotesk Thai is that, due to the Latin typeface’s unusually tall x-height, the Thai extension was intentionally designed to match the height of the Latin lowercase.
The designers had to bridge the features that make SG Latin’s construction unique–its textural sturdiness and wonky details—into the context of Thai script design principles. The eventual source of inspiration was something of a surprise but also made perfect sense: “The letterforms of Sharp Grotesk reminded us of old Thai signage, and we were inspired to use them as a basis for the design. We conducted research and had a lot of discussions to find potential vernacular letters which could be applied to Sharp Grotesk Thai,” says Smich.
Once the concept was established, the first letters that Cadson Demak designed were ‘บ (Bo-bai-mai)’, ‘น (No-nu)’, and ‘ม (Mo-ma)’ which are the main letters for establishing proportion. They then expanded the designated proportions to ‘หอกลางฐานจัตุรัส’, a Thai test word which contains letterforms with a good variety of ascenders and descenders. This test word ensures that the construction of the letterforms works smoothly across all masters.
The contemporary idea in Sharp Grotesk Thai bring about two alternative pairs of letters, “ร (Ro-rua), and “ธ (Tho-thong)”; together they are considered a confusing pair. These alternates are hidden in stylistic sets. Both of the stylistic sets provide alternates for ร and ธ, as seen in the 1980s. With ss01, we interpreted these letters toward a more sharp-cut style, and in ss02, we drew them in a curvy style. Both styles are popular in dry-transfer lettering and Thai signage during that time.
Conclusion
Every good contemporary typeface is an amalgamation: of invention and homage, the contemporary and the timeless, human feeling and machine perfection. Taste is essential, but so is good judgment and technique. The original Latin release of Sharp Grotesk has the Swiss spirit in its texture, but idiosyncratic details in the letterforms impart a warmth that sets it apart from so many other contemporary neo-grotesks, and its wide variety of width and weight make it endlessly versatile.
Its variety now extends into new territory and is an ongoing exploration. The world of multi-script type design is still fresh. As such, there’s a responsibility for type designers to establish organic processes that respect the principles of individual native scripts while progressing the design language. Harmonizing these different scripts under a single family has been anything but mechanical or systemized, and the time spent developing these processes reflects our due diligence. Every shape and proportion has been scrutinized while the overall impression is one of absolute ease. By the same token, we had to wait until the right moment to make our first variable font. While the original blueprint of Sharp Grotesk has been practically recontextualized with these extensions, Sharp Grotesk Global exists in these combined worlds while retaining the sturdy yet playful feel that has made it so singular.
Sharp FM Record Slip Mat for SG Global
Our newest addition to Sharp Type Things: a double-sided Sharp FM vinyl slip mat that also functions as a type specimen for Sharp Grotesk. It features the unofficial Sharp FM slogan “Talk less, listen more” spiraling outward in all five scripts on Side A; Side B has our Sharp Grotesk Globe graphic.
Credits
Type Director: Lucas Sharp
SG Latin Design: Lucas Sharp with Greg Gazdowicz, Wei Huang, Chantra Malee & Octavio Pardo
Specimen: Lucas Sharp, Chantra Malee
SG Greek Design: Jovana Jocic with Kostas Riginos
Specimen: Kostas Riginos
SG Cyrillic Design: Maria Doreuli & Lucas Sharp with Jovana Jocic & Connor Davenport
Specimen: Jovana Jocic
SG Hangul Design: Minjoo Ham & Lucas Sharp
Specimen: Jae Ee and Sangah Shin
SG Thai Design: Cadson Demak with Calvin Kwok & Lucas Sharp
Specimen: Cadson Demak
Latin Kerning: Lucas Sharp
Greek + Cyrillic Kerning: Igino Marino
Mastering: Connor Davenport
Specimen Producer: My-Lan Thuong
SG Variable Engineering: Connor Davenport
984 total styles
V.1 Oct 2016
V.2 Oct 2019
V.3 Mar 2023