Frere-Jones Type

The Type Directors Club opened their 2018 awards lecture series with a reference to Beatrice Warde’s “A Printing Office.” It is so good. And it evoked so much of what we heard while researching the Frere-Jones Type brand story. Tobias and his team were clear on their philosophy and so quotable. Why search the world for the right words to market this type when there were so many right here?

Going forward, a set of master texts from the Frere-Jones team will be published with each typeface release and typeset for large format printing, then carved up and used throughout collateral and communications. Holding it all together is a consistent captioning system that allows us to attribute the text and inform on the font release.

Positioning, Digital, Messaging, Brand strategy

Agency
The Original Champions of Design

Design Partners
Jennifer Kinon
Bobby C. Martin Jr.

Design Director
Michael McCaughley

2019

The first release to implement the new system is Empirica. The team described it as “graceful to gutsy” and shared the story of its archeology and invention. We found that Empirica Extra Light works beautifully at extra-large sizes.

To show off the delicate serifs, we set the master text at scale, cropped in on that incredible ‘G’ then went to work drawing out the story of the font from website to specimen book to print ad and finally social media.

Empirica is available for purchase and the poster is too.