Discover and try the whole Altona Family at TypeMates’!
With proud roots in Hamburg, Altona is a distinctive and cosmopolitan display typeface inspired by the original street signs of the Altona district. Altona is a bold character—clearly constructed, yet unconventionally playful. Delicately engineered with an unpolished charm, Altona is a display typeface with perfect craftsmanship and a mind of its own.
I joined Albert-Jan Pool and Julia Uplegger half way of the development of this typeface family: I took over the fine-tuning of letterforms, spacing and grey value, added SmallCaps and wrote all the many OpenType Features including a special one for stacked fractions, which allows to write customised numerators and denominators for up to ten digits.
Also I contributed more than 160 icons inspired by Hamburg’s district: around 60 pictograms relate directly to the history of Altona. They illustrate famous landmarks of the city, different types of ships, means of transport and offer a range of maritime and Hanseatic symbols, such as a Franzbrötchen. The icons are emblematic of the emerging and modernising Altona of the time, and are still state of the art today: the weight axis of the variable font can be used to flexibly configure the weights of the pictograms and symbols.
