F37 Lara

Tell us about the inspiration behind your collaboration with F37®×. If it was an unused concept, what was the potential use case for it.

F37 Lara was originally a caps-only, geometric Cyrillic sans serif typeface created in 2010 for the Kyiv-based luxury department store Sanahunt. It was featured prominently in their seasonal newspaper/lookbook The Sanahunt Times. Our intention was to create a display typeface that would look crisp and elegant when used on headlines at extremely large sizes – even if it was just a single character filling an entire page. F37 Lara needed to extend beyond its caps-only Cyrillic origins to include a complete Roman upper and lowercase character set, while allowing the user to have precise control over the contrast between the thick and thin strokes. F37 Lara is intended for large headlines, concise pronouncements, declarations of independence and other fashionista outbursts.

When starting the process of creating your font, what typographic conventions did you look to break or experiment with? Or were there conventions of functionality you championed?

Our primary ambition was to create a font that could be used really, really big while retaining its elegance. We wanted to push the term ‘hairline’ as far as it would go. However, when used at smaller sizes those super thin strokes were likely to disappear altogether, so it was important to add a variable feature that would allow for precise control over the relationship between the thick and thin strokes. F37 Lara has three preset weights to choose from (Hairline, Display and Text) but the variable feature allows for the contrast to be tweaked according to personal preference. F37 Lara was inspired by the long history of Didone fonts being used in fashion publications. We wanted our own Didone but sans serif, with a much simpler, more geometric construction that might be found in the lighter weights of Futura or, perhaps most of all, Avant Garde. Each stroke needed to be either vertical, horizontal, at a strict 45° or purely circular, as much as possible. Of course, this kind of structural purity is often completely at odds with typographic norms so there’s an implied tug-of-war between the strict rules of this font and how fonts naturally want to express themselves.

Now that your typeface has launched, what would be your dream project to use your F37® typeface on?

We’d love to see it standing right next to a supermodel. Perhaps even wrapping around a supermodel if that’s not too much to ask.

What have you learnt through developing and creating your own typeface(s) with our F37® type designers?

We’ve discovered that our instincts for creating fonts are often at odds with the instincts of a professional font designer. We are often guided by the Brian Eno school of defining a set of seemingly arbitrary rules and then sticking to them come what may. Our inflexibility with these rules has a tendency to butt up against centuries of nuanced, typographic craftsmanship but our hope is that it’ll create some unexpected results that won’t offend absolutely everybody. Luckily the F37® team is not populated by curmudgeonly traditionalists. They were extremely accommodating of our uncompromising approach and the results speak for themselves. We realise there might be aspects of our font that people could find a bit strange, such as its impossibly tight kerning or its rather mechanistic geometry but those are the qualities we like and we hope others will like also.

How would you describe your typeface in three words?

Geometry gets emotional.