Mertz Sans

‘Mertz’ is a design based upon the mixing aspects of a number of early Twentieth Century typefaces, specifically Metro, Tempo, Bernhard Gothic, Vogue and Nobel. The aim is to draw the uppercase characters fairly close to aspects of the old designs, to create a free webfont highly suited to ‘all caps’ headlines, but to ‘move away’ from the original lowercases.

There was a fairly large group of these similar faces designed in the late 1920′s and early 1930′s in Europe and the USA. Lucian Bernhard Designed Bernhard Gothic in 1929 for the American Typefounders foundry, in 1929. Metro was first designed, two years earlier, for Linotype’s machines in the USA in 1927, by William Dwiggins. Tempo was designed in 1931 for the Ludlow Foundry by Robert Hunter Middleton. Vogue, published in 1930, was the Intertype version of this ‘modernist’ face, and Nobel was a variant from Amsterdam type Foundry. It is often considered that these designs were published as counters to the European Modern geometric faces such as Futura and Kabel, but it is uncertain whether all of these designs were inspired directly from each other, or whether some were designed wholly in isolation. ‘Verlag’, a font published in 2006 by Hoefler & Frere-Jones is a contemporary example of the re-mixing together of some of these older designs. Frere-Jones also designed a version of Nobel from 1993-03 for The Font Bureau.