TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Thu Sep 10 20:54:51 EDT 2015

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ABOUT

Berton Hasebe

Berton Hasebe (b. 1982, Honolulu, HI) moved from Hawaii to study and work in Los Angeles, where he obtained a BA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2005.

In 2007 he moved to the Netherlands to study type design through the Type and Media Masters course at The Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (KABK). His typeface Alda was designed to function at very small sizes while remaining expressive. The bold is macho and delicate at the same time. Alda won an award at TDC2 2009. In the same year Alda was also selected by the Tokyo Type Directors Club to be included in its annual publication. It was published by Emigre.

Since 2008 he resides in New York and has been working for Commercial Type, where he co-designed the extensive family Stag with Christian Schwartz and Ross Milne. Stag started as a small family of slab serifs commissioned for headlines by the US edition of Esquire magazine and eventually grew into a sprawling multi-part family including a flexible sans companion and two additional special effects display variants. Stag Stencil followed in 2009.

In 2010, he published the geometric sans serif family Platform at Commercial Type. It has a gorgeous circle-based hairline.

In 2013, he published a 4-family 20-style French Renaissance typeface family called Portrait (+Text, +Inline, +Text), still at Commercial Type: Portrait started out as an experiment in drawing a display typeface that managed to be both beautiful and brutal, and both classical and minimalist. While its lighter weights are quietly elegant, the heavier weights show the influence of chiseled woodcut forms. Portrait draws its primary inspiration from the Two-line Double Pica Roman (equivalent to 32pt in contemporary sizes) cut by French punchcutter Maître Constantin around 1530 for the printer Robert Estienne. Portrait replaces the delicately modeled serif treatments of Constantin's original with simple, triangular Latin serifs, reimagining the Renaissance forms in a contemporary light. Portrait Text resembles the text types attributed by the printing historian Hendrik Vervliet to Constantin and used by the printer Estienne in the 1530s, which had a lighter and more open texture than the text types that preceded them, and marking the move to more elegant type that culminated in the work of Claude Garamont. The stripped-back simplicity of the Latin serifs gives Portrait a cleaner and sharper tone than a typical Renaissance oldstyle-influenced text face, bringing an active personality to text.

In 2015, he created the sans headline typeface families Druk, Druk Text, Druk Wide, Druk Condensed and Druk Text Wide: Druk is a study in extremes, featuring the narrowest, widest, and heaviest typefaces in the Commercial Type library to date. Starting from Medium and going up to Super, Druk is uncompromisingly bold. It was meant as a companion of Neue Haas Grotesk. Of the families in the Druk collection, Druk Condensed is the most explicit homage to Willy Fleckhaus. Originally designed for the 2011 Year in Review issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, its flat sides make letters and words snap together in a clean and satisfying way.

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