LL Blankenhorn
Lineto · Tobias-David Albert · 2019
A three-style script family rooted in the post-war German hand-lettering of Fritz Blankenhorn, digitised by calligrapher Tobias-David Albert with over 5,000 contextual glyph combinations.
About
Blankenhorn references the distinctive brush-painted lettering of Fritz Blankenhorn (1921–2011), in-house designer at Deutscher Bücherbund, whose hand-lettering appeared on Max Frisch's Homo Faber in 1957 and became a signature style for the bestselling novels of Johannes Mario Simmel. Designer Tobias-David Albert identified three stylistic threads in Blankenhorn's book cover work and built a contextual system of more than 5,000 ligatures and alternate glyph combinations so that letters adjust their shape and position relative to their neighbours, producing text that reads as genuinely composed by hand. The family covers the full Latin character set with careful optimisation for 26 languages including those with complex diacritics.
Classification
A family of three script fonts emulating German post-war hand-lettering, drawing on the calligraphic brush-painted style of Fritz Blankenhorn's book cover work. The three styles (Script, Formal, Typewriter) each represent a distinct thread of that lettering tradition.