Aeonis™
By Linotype
Greek Lapidary inscriptions from the 9th century BC were one of the inspirations behind Aeonis. The other inspiration was industrial designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s famous Düren lamp. “It is typical of Wagenfeld’s work, where round and rectangular forms are in counterpoint to each other,” says Faulhaber. “I’ve tried to incorporate this balance of simple angular and curved shapes into Aeonis.”
Faulhaber studied design in Karlsruhe at the Center for Art and Media under Professor Kurt Weidemann. “I’ve been fascinated by letters for as long as I can remember,” Faulhaber recalls. “When I was a child, the letters on a book cover, a poster or a truck tarpaulin made a strong impression on me. I found their shapes irresistible, and I fell in love with them.” After graduating, Faulhaber worked briefly at Linotype, and in 1996 embarked on his career as an independent designer. Faulhaber has taught typography at the universities of Halle, Weimar and Wuppertal.
Faulhaber sees the conflict between antiquity and modernity as a struggle between angular and round forms. On of his goals in Aeonis was reconciling this visual conflict. His aim was to distill the glyphs in the design to their primary forms. Anything that is not absolutely necessary for easy character recognition has been removed. This includes the terminals of character strokes in the lower case and part of the horizontal strokes in characters like the f, t and 4. Even the crossbar of the cap A was removed and is available as an alternate to the more traditional design.
The Aeonis family is made up of three widths and seven weights. Its open letterforms ensure legibility at small sizes, while its stark shapes make a strong statement at large sizes. Aeonis works both in complex text layouts and simple headlines. The Aeonis family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts. Designers can work with this versatile design while taking advantage of OpenType’s capabilities. The Aeonis Pro fonts also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.