Change™ Typeface
For 12 years, the custom typeface Change served as Berlin’s brand font. Now Change is finally allowed to unfold its potential – optimized and expanded – for the benefit of all brands and projects that are in need of renewal or quite simply a change.
Alessio Leonardi’s first drafts already contained the unmistakable characteristics of the later extended family: the strong horizontal emphasis, curved diagonals in selected letters, broken stems in the italics as well as the contrasting interplay of angular and round elements.
“What is special about Change is its humanity. The family was not stringently planned, it has grown and gone through several stages of development. Despite its clarity and functionality, it appears lively and unconventional. It is not what you expect, but always something different.” is how Alessio describes the temperament of his typeface.
The name for the Berlin typeface came about almost automatically. “Change” refers both to the transformation of a vital big city and to the visual characteristics of the typeface. Alessio Leonardi: “The letters are not static, yet they produce a calm text image. Change is unconventional and has many peculiar details, but looks immediately familiar. It is not perfect, just as a living city is never perfect. Change is open to the new, it embodies change and is itself part of change.”
An unusual feature is that the tracking is reduced as the stroke width increases. This means that a bold cut like ExtraBlack takes up less space than a thin cut like Hairline. At the same time, a more harmonious white space of the counters and the spacing is achieved.
With the retail version of Change, we expanded the number of weights from five to eleven (insert Spinal Tap joke here), coordinated them better and pushed the limits of the shapes with new extremes in favor of greater flexibility: Hairline, Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, Black and ExtraBlack. In order to control the letters precisely, we rebuilt the entire family on the basis of three masters with modern tools and taking into account increased demands. With the Variable Fonts, which are now available for the first time, all nuances of additional stroke widths between the extremes of Hairline and ExtraBlack can be set.
