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ABOUT

Dalton Maag [Bruno Maag]

Swiss designer Bruno Maag (b. Zürich) founded Dalton Maag in 1991, and set up shop in Brixton, South London. He serves the corporate market with innovative type designs, but also has a retail font line. Ex-Monotype designer Ron Carpenter designs type for the foundry. In the past, type designers Veronika Burian worked for Dalton Maag. A graduate of the Basel School of Design, who worked at Stempel and was invitedd by Rene Kerfante to Join Monotype to start up a custom type department. After that, he set up Dalton Maag with his wife Liz Dalton. He has built the company into a 40-employee enterprise with offices in London, Boston, Brazil (where the main type designer is Fabio Luiz Haag), Vienna and Hong Kong.

The Dalton Maag team designed these commercial fonts:

• Airbnb Cereal (2018). A sans typeface commissioned by Airbnb. Dalton Maag describes it as playful, open and simple.
• Aktiv Grotesk (2010). Published as an alternative to Helvetica, a typeface Bruno hates with a passion. It also covers Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In 2020, it became a 3-axis (weight, width, italic) variable font.
• Aller Typo.
• Almaq.
• Blenny (2014). A fat face didone by Spike Spondike.
• Bligh (2015). A three-weight sans family.
• Co (2007): a rounded monoline minimalist sans co-designed by Bruno Maag and Ron Carpenter.
• Cordale: a text family.
• Dedica (2007): a didone face.
• Effra and Effra Italic (2007-2009): sans family by Jonas Schudel and Fabio Luiz Haag. Followed in 2013 by Effra Corp.
• Elevon (2012). By Bruno Maag and Marconi Lima.
• Fargo (2004): a humanist sans in 6 weights.
• Foco. A sans family.
• Grueber (2008): a slab serif.
• InterFace (2007): an extensive sans family; one weight is free (2001). See also InterFace Corporate (2007).
• Kings Caslon (2007). By Marc Weymann and Ron Carpenter.
• Lexia (1999, Ron Carpenter and Dalton Maag): a slab serif family (Dalton Maag mentions the date as 2007). In 2019, Dalton Maag added Lexia Mono.
• Magpie (2008). A serifed family by Vincent Connare for Dalton Maag.
• Objektiv.
• Oscine (2014, by Bruno Maag, Ron Carpenter, Fernando Caro and Rafael Saraiva). A rounded organic sans typeface.
• Pan (1996). A text family at 1500 US dollars per style.
• Plume (2004): a display typeface inspired by calligraphy, co-designed with Ron Carpenter.
• Prometo. An organic stressed sans.
• Royalty (1999, +Royalty Obese, 2007): a stunning art deco display family.
• Scope One (2015). A free Google Font. It has a single light weight, whose slab serifs make it useful for headlines.
• Setimo (2015). By Fernando Caro. A distinguished sans.
• Soleto (2014, a simple sans by Bruno Mello, Fabio Haag, Fernando Caro, Rafael Saraiva and Ron Carpenter). Soleto won an award at Tipos Latinos 2014.
• Southampton.
• Sparkasse Serif (2003-2005). A custom typeface.
• Stroudley (2007): a sturdy large counter condensed sans by Bruno Maag, Ron Carpenter and Veronika Burian.
• Tephra (2008): a collaboration with Hamish Muir. This is an experimental multi-layered LED-inspired family.
• Tondo (2007, at Dalton Maag): a rounded information design sans family designed by Veronika Burian for Dalton Maag.
• Tornac (2013). A casual script.
• Ubuntu (2010): this is a team effort---a set of four styles of a free font called Ubuntu. This font supports the Indian rupee symbol. Some work for the Ubuntu Font Family was done by Rodrigo Rivas Costa in 2010. Download via Fontspace.
• Verveine (2009). A casual script by Luce Averous.
• Viato. A simple sans family co-designed by Bruno Maag and Ron Carpenter in 2007. This tapered terminal sans family includes Viato Corp (2007) and Viato Hebrew (2013).

Fonts sold at Fontworks, and through the Bitstream Type Odyssey CD (2001). At the ATypI in 2001 in Copenhagen, he stunned the audience by announcing that he would never again make fonts for the general public. From now on, he would just do custom fonts out of his office in London. And then he delighted us with the world premiere of two custom font families, one for BMW (BMWType, 2000, a softer version of Helvetica, with a more virile "a"; some fonts are called BMWHelvetica), and one for the BMW Mini in 2001 (called MINIType: this family comprises MINITypeRegular-Bold, MINITypeHeadline-Regular, MINITypeHeadline-Bold, MINITypeRegular-Regular).

Other custom typefaces: Tottenham Hotspur (2006), Teletext Signature (by Basten Greenhill Andrews and Dalton Maag), Skoda (Skoda Sans CE by Dalton Maag is based on Skoda Formata by Bernd Möllenstädt and MetaDesign London), UPC Digital, BT (for British Telecommunications), Coop Switzerland (for Coop Schweiz), eircom, Lambeth Council, Tesco (2002), PPP Healthcare, ThyssenKrup (Dalton Maag sold his soul to these notorious arms dealers; TK Type is the name of the house font), Co Headline (2006), Co Text (2006, now a commercial font), Telewest Broadband, Toyota Text and Display (2008), TUIType, HPSans (for Hewlett-Packard, 1997). His custom Vodafone family (sans) (2005) is based on InterFace. In 2011, Dalton Maag created Nokia Pure for Nokia's identity and cellphones, to replace Erik Spiekermann's Nokia Sans (2002). The Nokia Pure typeface has rounder letters, and is simultaneously more legible and more rhythmic.

In 2010, the Dalton Maag team consisted of Bruno Maag and David Marshall as managing and operations directors, and Vincent Connare as production manager. The type designers are Amélie Bonet, Ron Carpenter, Fabio Haag, Lukas Paltram and Malcolm Wooden.

In 2015, Kindle picked the custom serif font Bookerly by Dalton Maag for their typeface. Still in 2015, Dalton Maag custom designed the sans typeface family Amazon Ember for Amazon for use in its Kindle Oasis. Free download of both Amazon Ember and Bookerly.

Dalton Maag created the custom typeface family Facebook Sans in 2017.

Bressay (2016). Stuart Brown led the design and did the engineering for Bressay (design by Tom Foley, Selma Losch, and Spike Spondike, at Dalton Maag, London), which won an award at TDC 2016. Later additions include Bressay Arabic [designers not identified by Adobe] and Bressay Devanagari [designers not mentioned by Adobe].

ATT Aleck is a large custom typeface family designed in 2016.

Netflix Sans (2018): Netflix replaced Gotham to combat spiraling licensing costs and commissioned its own bespoke typeface: Netflix Sans under design lead Noah Nathan. Free download. The family include Netflix Sans Icon (2017). Comments by designers at The Daily Orange.

In 2018, Dalton Maag designed the custom typefaces Itau Display and Itau Text for Itau Unibanco, a large Brazilian bank.

In 2019, Dalton Maag produced a corporate typeface for Air Arabia.

Venn (2019, Bruno Maag). A 5 weight 5 width corporate branding sans typeface, with an option to get Venn Variable.

Typefaces from 2020: Dark Mode VF (a humanist sans designed specifically for digital user interfaces, offering subtle grade adjustments to counteract the effects of setting light type on a dark background, as is common with many dark mode digital reading environments; it has two axis in its variable type format---weight and dark mode), Highgate VF (a variable humanist sans inspired by traditional British stone carving), Goldman Sans (a free clean sans family that includes three variable fonts; Goldman Sachs lets you use it except to criticize the company or any other capitalist pigs).

Interview in 2012 in which he stresses that typefaces should above all be functional.

View the Dalton Maag typeface library. Speaker at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw and at ATypi 2015 in Sao Paulo, where he gave an electrifying talk on type design for dyslexics (with Alessia Nicotra). Speaker at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw. Speaker at ATypI 2017 Montreal and at ATypI 2018 in Antwerp.

Adobe link.

EXTERNAL LINKS
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INTERNAL LINKS
Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in Switzerland ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Pixel/bitmap fonts ⦿ Experimental type ⦿ Type design in the United Kingdom ⦿ Corporate typefaces ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ The Rupee Symbol ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ LED / LCD fonts ⦿ Art deco typefaces ⦿ Caslon ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿ Corporate typefaces ⦿ Typefaces and type design for Arabic ⦿ Indic language fonts ⦿