“At the beginning, only a few magazine and exhibition designers were using it. But Graphik was not an over-night success. Graphik has been used in many publications including Esquire, Wallpaper*, T, the New York Times Style Magazine, and Bon Appétit. The company designs and publishes retail fonts as well as custom typography for clients around the world. Commercial Type is a “Transatlantic Venture” with Schwartz in New York City and Barnes in London. Graphik became one of the first releases from Commercial Type, a foundry that he started with designer Paul Barnes after working with him on the type for an award-winning redesign of The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, 2003–2005. He told them it wasn’t available commercially but, like many things in life, “If you tell them it’s not for sale, it becomes the thing they want more than anything else in the world.” He started licensing it to a few people and then realized he should finish it and release it properly. “Graphik was never intended for release, it was just the sans-serif that I wanted for myself.” But soon, clients were asking what font was on his PDFs and asking if it was available for use. Schwartz took his obsession and designed a “Swiss Style” typeface for himself which he started using for invoices and PDFs to clients. Typographics 2017 is using the Graphik type family, including the new Compact and Condensed widths that will be released later this year. These typefaces have a similar style and are of the same era as Helvetica, Univers, or Futura, but they don’t have the baggage associated with them.”Īlong with the Ohm type family, Graphik is being used as part of the design for the 2017 Typographics design festival, so we asked Schwartz about the history of the design. “Graphik came out of my love of the ‘B-List’ of European sans-serifs like Plak, Neuzeit Grotesk, Folio, and others. The inspiration for the typeface Graphik (pronounced “graphic” not “graph-eek”) started with an obsession with Swiss Modernism from graphic designer Christian Schwartz.

Graphik condensed zip