Responses by Jacob Heftmann, graphic design director, Grilli Type.
Background: GT Canon was developed as a contemporary serif typeface family, free from the weight of historical references and designed for modern typographic application. We imagined it as the universal, canonical serif for today’s designer.
Design thinking: GT Canon can project many different distinct tones and excel in diverse applications, with a large range of styles across weight, width, optical size, and mono and proportional spacing. We wanted to showcase its range, so a website and a printed publication with 26 classic texts—including long-running passages, intricate user interfaces and graphical headlines—helped us put the typeface through its paces. It’s also designed to be paired with GT Standard, our sans serif counterpart, to create a truly universal tool.
Challenges: Designing a typeface—particularly a serif—with so many styles required a lot of unique design solutions, production work, and meticulous testing and refinement. Beyond the design of the typeface itself, we felt that the size of the typeface family demanded an equally robust showcase of its capabilities.
Favorite details: Creating a single typeface that “can do it all” is so commonly claimed that it’s hardly worth saying, but in the case of Canon, we do believe it has the range to be as expressive as desired—like in the black styles or extended widths—filling the expected roles of serif designs. From there, it can find its way into more innovative and unique uses and visual spaces, perhaps using the monospace or Macro optical size for user interface design, for example.
Visual influences: For GT Canon, we intentionally looked beyond specific typographic influences or reference points; instead, we thought about how a digital-first, ground-up serif design would look and function. To showcase the typeface, we dug into the world of literary classics—both well-known and not—to explore what it means for a work of art to pass from current to canonical.
Time constraints: In general, type design favors patience. With a family this large, that’s especially true. Contrasting with most graphic design projects that have ever-shrinking timelines, our projects are more about endurance than being rushed. That comes with its own challenges, but, of course, like most designers, we could keep tinkering and improving endlessly. At some point, though, it’s time to turn the typeface over to other designers to start using.
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