In a studio in the attic of a building on the Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, a type designer named Lukas Schneider is finishing a typeface that will be used for exactly one purpose: the label system of a single-malt whisky distillery in Speyside, Scotland. The face — a modified blackletter with contemporary spacing metrics and a set of custom ligatures for the distillery’s name — has taken him fourteen months.
“They asked for something that looked like it had been on the label for a hundred years but was also completely contemporary,” Schneider says, turning his monitor to show a specimen sheet. “Those two requirements contradict each other in interesting ways. Resolving the contradiction is most of the work.”
Typeface design has always included commissioned work, but the current generation of independent foundries is taking commissions of a specificity and narrowness that earlier periods would not have sustained. Fonts for single brands, single publications, single use cases — and sometimes fonts so purpose-built that their utility outside their commissioning context is essentially zero.
In Stockholm, the foundry Letters from Sweden — Göran Söderström and Carl Hulme — designed ‘Stockholm Type’ for the city’s public transport system, a face so precisely tuned to the environmental graphics of that specific system that it would look wrong anywhere else. In Melbourne, a designer named Soo-Young Kang spent two years developing a typeface for the Victorian Hansard, the official parliamentary record — a text face optimised for the specific paper stock, printing conditions, and column width of a document that has been continuously published since 1856.
“Most people who use Hansard don’t notice the typography,” Kang says. “Which is exactly the point. If they notice it, something has gone wrong. The face is designed to be invisible while remaining absolutely right for every condition it encounters.” She lists those conditions with the precision of someone who has spent months cataloguing them: the way ink spreads on uncoated parliamentary paper, the minimum size at which footnote text must remain legible, the optical behaviour of the typeface when reproduced in the public record’s online PDF version.
The economics of this work are not obvious. A commission for a single-use typeface rarely pays better than licensing a retail face to a large client. But several designers working in this space describe a set of benefits that are harder to quantify: total creative control, the intellectual satisfaction of genuine constraints, and the particular pleasure of being paid to think about a problem that no one else has thought about before.
“There is no reference,” says Schneider, back in Berlin. “For the distillery project, I could look at historical blackletter and at contemporary display type and at whisky label history, but there was nothing that had resolved this exact problem for this exact context. That is unusual in type design, where there is almost always a precedent. It is a gift, even when it is terrifying.”
The specimen sheet he shows me is three pages. The typeface will be used in approximately six point sizes across four label formats. It will be seen by people examining a bottle in a whisky shop, in restaurant lighting, on an e-commerce site. It will run alongside a set of illustrations commissioned from a Glasgow artist. It will exist, in its full resolution, on the label of approximately 40,000 bottles per year. For this, Schneider has designed 340 glyphs, eight OpenType features, and one set of proportional figures. He seems entirely at peace with the ratio.
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