Geometron has its origin in a custom typeface that I was commissioned to design for an architectural project. The concept was a "back to basics", minimalist typeface constructed mainly with straight lines and circles or circular arcs, but without departing from the classical style of Roman & Greek lettering. Notable requirements were: an extensive character set needed for multi-language documentation, as well as a full collection of symbols and alternate glyph forms (e.g. superiors & inferiors) for scientific use. Special care was taken to obviate the almost identical similarities that were prone to appear between letters like uppercase "i" and lowercase "L" or between Latin and Greek letters such as "a" and "alpha". This was also a prerequisite for scientific notation where ambiguity is not acceptable. All in all, the font would have to blend a modern design with a wealth of functional features. Consequently, all of these were made possible by choosing the OpenType format for development, resulting in a comprehensive and feature-rich font family specifically targeted for use in high-end design/typesetting applications.

The Tes family was designed specially for a limited-edition book about Nikola Tesla and Resonance Waves. It needed to be modern and complete for a multilingual version of the book.

Happenstance came out of a play session with Bezier curves with a sense of fun built into its being. First came play, then came work. Thomas Edison once said,”Creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Nikola Tesla thought the opposite. In this case, what started as inspiration took a lot of perspiration to corral into a usable font. So maybe the reality is a) different for different people or b) somewhere in the middle. Just sayin’.

Nikola is a text typeface that offers a wide range of possibilities. While its regular and medium weights were specially optimized for maximum performance, balanced for excellent legibility and carefully crafted to spread a scent of tradition on long text settings; its extreme weights, on the other hand, were designed with a more display use in mind, and thanks to the flexibility place at disposal by its many alternates, swashes, decorative cartouches, borders and ornaments, can deliver a vintage, reliable, dynamic, fancy and even playful inflection to the text. Nikola includes a large set of over 1400 glyphs, support for more than 200 latin script languages and 1.21 gigawatts of the finest type design generated by classic proportions, the elegance and formality of the early XX century and a glimpse of expressionism on terminals and serifs. Nikola was named after Nikola Tesla as a tribute to the pioneers of the electric age.