Responses by Thierry Blancpain, cofounder, Grilli Type.
Background: GT Era reimagines the warmth and idiosyncrasies of early grotesk typefaces for our own era. These pre-modernist tools were being pushed to their extremes in the radical designs of the modernist movements of the period, like Bauhaus and De Stijl. The typeface shuns neutrality and embraces friction, championing recognition over uniformity and flavor over conformity.
Design thinking: Designers of that time were limited to whatever typefaces their printer offered. The Bauhaus gained its own letterpress workshop in 1925, and Breite Fette Grotesk was one of the available typefaces. Other print shops instead had Venus, Akzidenz Grotesk or lesser-known grotesks of this style. When multiple font sizes were required, typefaces often had to be mixed. GT Era offers size-appropriate type—useful for today’s designers—by bringing back the unique charm of related but clearly different designs for these sizes.
Challenges: I wasn’t interested in a typeface revival that just copies a previous design. Instead, it’s much more interesting—but also more challenging—to find the aspects that still work in source materials and build on that to create a typeface that offers something truly new for today’s designers.
Favorite details: GT Era evokes that era of late 19th-century grotesks without applying a lot of the details that would feel historical or dated. Finding the right balance and making a tool that answers historical questions but also contemporary needs—that was really fulfilling.
New lessons: I had a good idea of the work of Bauhaus designers, but delving deeper into their individual works and practices proved to be a lot of fun. Designers at the Bauhaus were really quite naïve and forged their own paths to what we now consider the hallmarks of modernist graphic design.
Visual influences: Beyond the typeface, the minisite we created for GT Era was meant to reflect on early modernist designs without becoming a pastiche. The final design by the team is so successful at evoking that time without too many direct references and without becoming a cliché.