Sophie O'Donnell

Ballinger began life as a single-weight proprietary typeface called baasic, designed for Dublin-based design office aad. baasic was intended as a plain, hardworking grotesque: a simple tool for clear communication. We’ve developed it into a fully-featured eight-weight family with matching italics. Sources include early 20th century jobbing sanses like Morris Benton’s News Gothic and Candia, a 70s-era typewriter face Josef Müller-Brockmann designed for Olivetti, which had unusually deep junctures that added energy to letters like m and n.

The family takes its name from Raymond A. Ballinger, the great mid-century American designer, author of ‘Lettering Art in Modern Use,’ and champion of elegance and readability. Ballinger has large counters and a generous x-height. Letters like a, e, and s open out gradually as they move from Thin to Black to maintain ample apertures, even in the darkest weights. Semi-oldstyle figures are available, as well as case-sensitive punctuation and delimiters. Italics incorporate subtle ogee curves to lend warmth and energy to the page or screen.

Bega is a simplified sans serif typeface. Formal reduction plays a strong role in its design. This is most visible in its ‘spurlessness.’ The visible strokes (or spurs) have been eliminated from the letterforms that would typically feature them. The lack of spurs in Bega is most-clearly visible when you look at the top-left corners of letters like ‘m’, ‘n’, and ‘r’. The Bega family includes eight weights, which range from Thin through Black. Each weight has two fonts on offer: An upright font, and an italic. Bega’s italics are obliques; their letterforms are slanted. The strokes of Bega’s letterforms all appear to be monolinear; that doesn’t mean that Bega is without contrast, however. Thanks to the family’s large number of weights – eight really is a lot – you can combine two or more of them with each other to create headlines that exhibit quite a bit of contrast! Each of Bega’s fonts includes a full range of numerators and denominators, to use when typesetting fractions, etc. The font’s numerals are proportional lining figures; these have the same height as Bega’s uppercase letters. The lowercase letters’ ascenders are tall, and they rise up above the tops of the capital letters and numerals. Bega’s friendly look makes it an ideal choice for use in corporate communication design. The typeface was designed by Sabina Chipară and Diana Ovezea.