Dane fonts

Typeface Review

Dane

Reviewed by Jürgen Siebert on January 25, 2012

Dane is a contemporary sans that distinguishes itself from others with its relatively wide proportions and some unusual lettershapes that give meaning to its name.

The 6-weight typeface is inspired by Danish industrial sign lettering from the 1940s. Its distinctive ‘g’ makes an immediate impact in all sizes and the lettershape itself is typically Danish, in a way, following a national tradition of daring double-story ‘g’s. Overall, I like the squarish architecture and compact text image that comes from Dane’s ultra-short ascenders and descenders. Despite these extreme proportions it’s surprisingly readable when small. I also admire the minimalist fractions, which contain only figures, no bars or slashes. Dane also offers some arrows suggesting its usefulness for signage, navigation, and information design.

Dane was designed by Henrik Kubel who runs the A2/SW/HK design studio in London along with Scott Williams. Their specialization in typographic work over the years has resulted in a lot of custom typefaces created for print, screen, and environmental design. These are offered under their young font label A2-Type, founded in 2010. There are 20 families in the A2 library at the moment, available from the new Danish retailer Playtype.

Jürgen Siebert is Director DACH Marketing of Monotype GmbH and editor of Fontblog.de (@fontblog). He is also a member of the FontFont TypeBoard. Since 1997 he has been responsible for TYPO Berlin, arguably the largest annual design conference in Europe, complemented 2016 with the type design conference TYPO Labs.

One Comment

  1. Wow! What a great discovery. I’d missed this one before – looks like a very cool, wonderful and useful face (with the little gripe of some oddly positioned diacritics). Thanks for pointing it out!

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