AM Assab
CAST · Alessandro Bombieri · 2024
A digital revival of a 1930s Italian wood type, reconstructed from the counterless geometric sans tradition that ran through Fascist-era advertising and into Milton Glaser's Baby Teeth.
About
Originally produced by Xilografia Ruggero Zuliani & C. in Verona in the early 1930s, Assab belongs to a strain of counterless sanserifs that shaped Italian advertising typography and found expression in Fortunato Depero's experimental lettering. Alessandro Bombieri's revival keeps close to the wooden source while rectifying rough edges and adding an alternate S to prevent the overlaps inherent in letter combinations such as ST and LS. A single Regular weight covers an extensive Latin character set spanning over seventy languages.
Classification
An all-caps, counterless geometric sans built from circles, triangles and rectangles, making it a display face in the constructivist/modernist tradition rather than a conventional text geometric sans.