Blatt.

Glyphs

Blatt Design Information

Smeijers’ Blatt family is a follow-up of Boekblad, a typeface designed in 1993. A reference to it can be found in Smeijers’ second book, ‘Type Now’ (Hyphen Press, London) on page 98, saying: ‘Boekblad, the trade magazine for the bookworld in The Netherlands, wanted to have a more colourful and fresher look. Our Quadraat group proposed the Quadraat typeface for text and a good display face was needed. I made some characters for display just for fun, which were inserted among other proposals. To my surprise these were then taken rather seriously, resulting in my first custom-made typeface.’

Asked about the design process, then and now, Smeijers recalls: ‘Back then, the design consisted out of just one roman weight. For decades since, it lay untouched, but, over the years, every time it came across my eyes, I kept having a good feeling about it. So, after 25 years, I decided to take this old piece of work seriously and extend it to a complete family. In doing so, I kept feeling positive about it and although old, it is still vibrant and breathes a dynamic that easily keeps up with today standards — after 25 years it has not lost much of its vigour.

Working on old designs of your own is a bit like making a revival of your own work. It can be very interesting, in fact, you confront your current-self with your old-self. New decisions have to made. “Maybe some features are too strong? What on earth was I thinking back then, by doing this or that?” I had to have some courage in order to keep as close as possible to the original and focusing on taking away small mistakes or details that nowadays might be considered minor inconsistencies.’

Blatt is suitable and well equipped for longer texts in small reading sizes and due its abrupt details behaves well on screens. Its’ general character is undoubtedly digital, and Blatt does not hide that at all. The design also has numerous qualities to serve as a display face. Blatt is therefore a suitable tool for a wide range of contemporary publications - dynamic or static - requiring a contemporary editorial touch and covering larger amounts of text in reading sizes.

The Blatt family consists of eight weights of roman and italic designs. Blatt is equipped with a full range of Latin Extended glyphs, lining and old-style figures, small capitals, and small capital currency-, figures-, math-, and case-sensitive punctuation.

Blatt fonts are available in OTF CFF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 formats. Legacy font formats are available on request.

Supported Languages

  • Afrikaans
  • Albanian
  • Asu
  • Basque
  • Bemba
  • Bena
  • Breton
  • Catalan
  • Chiga
  • Colognian
  • Cornish
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • Embu
  • English
  • Esperanto
  • Estonian
  • Faroese
  • Filipino
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Friulian
  • Galician
  • Ganda
  • German
  • Gusii
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Inari
  • Sami
  • Indonesian
  • Irish
  • Italian
  • Jola-Fonyi
  • Kabuverdianu
  • Kalenjin
  • Kamba
  • Kikuyu
  • Kinyarwanda
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Lower
  • Sorbian
  • Luo
  • Luxembourgish
  • Luyia
  • Machame
  • Makhuwa-Meetto
  • Makonde
  • Malagasy
  • Maltese
  • Manx
  • Meru
  • Morisyen
  • North
  • Ndebele
  • Northern
  • Sami
  • Norwegian
  • Bokmal
  • Norwegian
  • Nynorsk
  • Nyankole
  • Oromo
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Quechua
  • Romanian
  • Romansh
  • Rombo
  • Rundi
  • Rwa
  • Samburu
  • Sango
  • Sangu
  • Scottish
  • Gaelic
  • Sena
  • Serbian
  • Shambala
  • Shona
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Soga
  • Somali
  • Spanish
  • Swahili
  • Swedish
  • Swiss
  • German
  • Taita
  • Teso
  • Turkish
  • Upper
  • Sorbian
  • Uzbek
  • Volapuk
  • Vunjo
  • Walser
  • Welsh
  • Western
  • Frisian
  • Zulu

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