The original version of Engel was customized for a university magazine I was working on at the time. My intention was to design a typeface that works both in running text and in display sizes. I was missing a tight sans serif face with high legibility and an italic style that wasn’t just a slanted version of the roman. I wanted a masculine roman face with a corresponding feminine italic style.

Engel has a large x-height to make it work better in small sizes. The italic face is a true italic – the style is more condensed, slightly lighter in weight and a number of characters are different from the roman versions. The contrast in the width of the strokes is low, especially in the light-weights. In the bold-weights the contrast is larger to open up the face and avoid clotting.

The typeface Engel
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