“My intention was to create a face with a technical look that was still very readable and suitable for headlines and body text,” writes Siegfried Rückel. “While working on several fun faces, I suddenly discovered a form which seemed to be a good basis for a new design. This form appears in all of...
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“My intention was to create a face with a technical look that was still very readable and suitable for headlines and body text,” writes Siegfried Rückel. “While working on several fun faces, I suddenly discovered a form which seemed to be a good basis for a new design. This form appears in all of the FF Alega fonts, especially in the letters b, d, p, q, h, m, n, and u … as well as in most of the stroke endings and character curves. It was a challenge to find new forms for several characters. For example, the capital X looks like a pre-historic cave painting, or primitive African art. I also transferred the lower case g into a technoid form. I tested legibility using texts from pharmaceutical products, which you really must read character by character because you wouldn’t recognize the words with just a cursory glance at the text.”
The FF Alega family contains true italics with emphasis on the handwritten character, as you can see in the long descender of the italic f. The widths of the upper case letters correspond to the lower case letters, which gives the face a homogenous look and emphasizes its technical character. This means that the small caps have the same optical width as the uppercase letters. In the OpenType versions with layout features, you will find alternative @ glyphs, an older form of the German ß, 15 f and t ligatures, as well as several different arrows. FF Alega may be used for headlines, for text, or as a corporate typeface.
When Rückel originally designed FF Alega, he did not consider adding a serif version. But following the typeface’s release, he experimented with serifs and decided that the effort was worthwhile. FF Alega Serif has a technical look, but is very readable. It combines well with the original sans serif face.
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