18/04/2024
NEW RELEASE: Snaga Grotesk
https://www.lettersoup.de/product-category/snaga/
👉 🆕 Snaga is a new grotesque sans serif from Lettersoup. Despite their enduring popularity, the so-called ‘Swiss typefaces’ are not the best text fonts. Their tight letterspacing and rational character shapes, with less distinction between the letters, make them relatively less readable when set in small sizes. An extensive, in-depth examination of existing examples of the typographic genre determined there was room for a contemporary rational sans serif specifically tailored for body copy. The seed for the Snaga family was born.
📖 🧐 The first aim was to get the letter spaces as close as possible to the letters’ inner shapes in order to achieve a more even grey value and improve Snaga’s readability. For the same reason, the letterforms also needed to be more dynamic. This approach had the advantage of distinguishing the design from existing rational sans serifs. We collaborated closely with design studios during Snaga’s development, sending them test versions to try out in real-world settings. They pointed out the need for tighter versions optimized for banners and titles. Their request led to the creation of a variable font with an optical size axis controlling the tightness of the letterspacing and the level of kerning. It allows fine-tuning the typeface for different mediums and formats and adjusting the design to fit the optical size. Snaga also comes with three pre-defined static sub-families – Text, Display, and Banner – for out-of-the-box applications.
🔠 🔡 Besides the Latin character set, Snaga also supports Cyrillic and Greek, which were developed in collaboration with native-speaking designers. A lot of attention went to drawing distinctive Bulgarian alternates of Cyrillic letters, introduced globally as the Round Cyrillic stylistic set. This style adds characteristic typographic elements such as ascenders and descenders, making it look more consistent with the European scripts and reducing the white space between lines of text. Due to a lack of suitable Swiss grotesques supporting Bulgarian, Bulgarian graphic designers and agencies resort to using geometric sans serifs in Swiss-style projects. Snaga now allows them to remain faithful to the typical aesthetics. The type family is cut out for side-by-side typesetting of the different alphabets in multilingual projects. The variable font format makes it possible to fine-tune the typeface to achieve an equal grey value while compensating for the varying appearances of the scripts.
💥🖌 A unicase version of Snaga is nearly completed, with an Arabic complement in the works.
🇨🇭 🏔 The name Snaga is appropriate in many ways. It is Bulgarian for ‘nice body’. The word is similar to ‘snakka’, which means ‘to talk’ or ‘to speak’ in Danish. Cheekily, it also sounds like the Swiss ‘Schnügel’ or the German ‘Schnucki’, both meaning ‘cute’ or ‘sweety’.
🙏🫶 We are thankful to the many designers that supported us with this project!
Cyrillic reviews by: Doreuli, Nedelev, Кирил Златков, Traychev, Kateliev.
Greek reviews by: Vlachou.
Technical support by: Eigendorf.
All the great projects and in uses with the Snaga beta versions by: FRANK, Plus, , @Димитър Илчев, , Andreev, Limoni, Kostadin Kokalanov, Creativity.
