Acrylic
Pyte Foundry · Ellmer Stefan · 2025
A three-family neo-grotesque by Ellmer Stefan drawn from Albert Boton's Brasilia, moving from proportional to fixed-width spacing while deliberately unsettling the genre's air of rational certainty.
About
Rooted in Brasilia, Boton's 1950s Swiss sans for Hollenstein Phototypo, Acrylic progresses across three multiplexed families: Ortho (proportional), Pseudo (intermediate) and Mono (fixed-width), each in eight weights from Thin to Black. Hyper-closed apertures give strong, self-contained word images suited to logotypes and headlines, while the monospaced end acquires a bureaucratic texture useful for UI. Named stylistic sets including Pervert Alternates, Skeptic Alternates and Nihilist Alternates introduce deliberate formal disruptions, exposing the constructed nature of neo-grotesque transparency as a design ideology.
Classification
Acrylic derives from Brasilia, a Swiss neo-grotesque from the late 1950s, and deliberately interrogates the genre's conventions through stylistic alternates and multiplexed spacing variants. Its hyper-closed apertures and rational structure place it squarely within neo-grotesque tradition, even as it critiques it.