Grotesk 1001 Sans Serif Font

Grotesk 1001 Sans Serif Font

Grotesk 1001 (1001 as “Why designing a thousand and first Grotesk Font?” and “Thousand and One Night” magic) is a speculative experiment about emotions in type and the emerging technology Variable Fonts.

The starting point was the question whether the performativity of a text could be enhanced by adjusting the feeling of the font to the content of the text. Or would it rather disturb the readability? So I designed a relatively neutral Grotesk font, that was supposed to be adjustable to various emotions through the technology of Variabl Fonts. For that I followed the model of Universal Emotions. With this model, Paul Ekman assumed that the emotions anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness are universal across all cultures. Another question arised: Can they be converted into universally-read font faces?

Designers usually choose a font to communicate a certain emotion. But what happens if one Variable Font contains various emotions? Can it still be considered as one font family?