F37 Foundry enlists Pentagram, Collins and others to design metallic posters using new font

How do you stand out amongst a market saturated with font releases? Manchester-based foundry F37 has answered with a selection of 15 metallic posters delivered by various designers and agencies to “showcase the diversity” of its newly-released font, F37 Blanka. The font also appears across its new website, which launches today (17 January).

Studios who have contributed designs include: Collins, Dazzle Studio, Farrow, Give Up Art, Hey Studio, Hugh Miller, KurppaHosk, Made Thought, Nomad, North, Only Studio, Paul Belford, Pentagram, Snask and Wolff Olins.

“It’s always exciting seeing our fonts used by the best graphic designers around the world who we truly admire,” Rick Banks, F37 Foundry founder tells It’s Nice That, “and what better way to showcase the diversity and utilisation of F37 Blanka than having them designing top quality and unique printed posters.” Among the responses, Rick says design highlights include a poster from Made Thought; celebrating some of the most notable Blankas from history, a modernist take from North and Hey, and a design from Collins.

“Collins’ design really stood out as their poster is about highlighting the barriers young Black creative people encounter at different stages of their journey,” explains Rick Banks. “But it also maps the actions we can take as an industry to achieve better outcomes.” Yocasta Lachapelle, director of talent at Collins, explains that a thesis by Cheryl D. Miller titled Transcending the Problems of the Black Graphic Designer to Success in the Marketplace partly inspired its poster. This coupled with “experiences with Collins high school and college interns… inspired us to chart young Black designers’ journey into design today.”

As for the font that started it all, Rick Banks explains: “F37 Blanka is our take on a clean, classic Swiss sans serif, and was something we hadn’t yet offered for purchase from our library.” Designed as an approachable grotesque “with nuanced humanist inclinations”, the foundry believes the economical font is the “holy grail” – “an everyday workhorse font with subtle and unique differences which don’t distract when it is used as body copy.” F37 Blanka currently supports 16 weights, from delicately light to imposingly heavy.

While F37 Foundry placed emphasis on the font’s legibility at small sizes during creation – meticulously manually hinting the letterforms to make sure they are clear on screens of various sizes – the font has first been put to the test in print. Each F37 Blanka poster has been “lovingly screen-printed by Harvey Lloyd using a beautiful metallic silver”, a presentation Banks found particularly rewarding to see against “the backdrop of the modern culture of constantly updated PDFs”.

Originally intended to be displayed in a London exhibition, the complete set of posters can now be found on F37 Foundry’s online shop.