Milieu Grotesque was founded in 2010 by graphic and type designers Timo Gaessner and Alexander Colby in Zurich. Today, the foundry is based in Lisbon, Portugal. Milieu Grotesque’s typefaces are versatile and system-oriented but also have a distinctive and often slightly quirky character which has made them a popular choice for contemporary graphic designers.

Milieu Grotesque’s small but refined library is steadily being expanded and regularly updated. Their most recognized typeface is Maison Neue, a reworking of Maison with slightly less quirky details, that was published as a superfamily in 2012 and revised in 2017. Maison Neue is a grotesk that references the reduced formality of the constructed sans-serifs of the early 20th century, bringing the oddities of those typefaces it into the present day in a well-balanced and less dogmatic way.

But also the other typefaces in the catalogue are worth a cover look, not only because they are all made with a lot of care and attention to detail and very well executed and mastered. All of their designs combine the functional with the unexpected. There is Lacrima, a comprehensive family based on the famous IBM Golfball typewriter. Patron is based on the contradictory ideas of type designers Günther Gerhard Lange and Roger Excoffon, merging expressiveness and consequent precision into a modern, versatile grotesk. And Brezel Grotesk is a modern but friendly grotesk with an “inward curling stroke ends that subtly commemorate the ubiquitous silhouette of a Bavarian pretzel.”

☞ https://www.milieugrotesque.com/

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This post is part of the Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar 2022

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