ABC Walter Font Family

ABC Walter Font Family is a long-standing, joint scholarly effort by Dinamo and Omnigroup: It comprises of Walter Alte and Walter Neue, two related yet ideologically opposed families celebrating an author and design educator with fingerprints all over Switzerland’s most famous fonts.

This has been a new kind of revival project for us, one that’s not based on a pre-existing typeface. Instead, our point of departure has been a tool used to teach students how to draw letterforms, designed by type educator Walter Käch in the mid-twentieth century. The triple styles of Walter Alte are a faithful study of Käch’s lessons, while Walter Neue is an extension, update, and digitally-minded interpretation.

Walter Alte consists of three faithfully revived cuts: Walter Alte Röntgentherapie has the highest contrast, while Walter Alte Normalgrotesk is the most constructed and mono-linear. Walter Alte Rauchwaren is smoother and slimmer, sitting in-between the first two stylistically, and recalling the way it once became a fertilizer to the Helvetica empire.

Walter Neue, on the other hand, is our extension and interpretation of Käch’s teachings — it’s not so much the “idea of a typeface” as a typeface itself, with fourteen styles, seven weights, Italics, stylistic alternates, and more. The feeling of the font’s original remains but we allowed for exceptions when it came to contrast and alignment. Walter Neue is readable and functional, with high contrast only in its heaviest weights. It’s altogether softer and less rigid than its studious older brother, featuring rounded dots (i, j, ä, ö, ü) and punctuation marks that lend it a friendlier edge.