Introducing Brutal Types

After six months of intense work, we are proud to introduce Brutal Types—a collection of display fonts inspired by the lettering works created by designers and architects associated with the avant-garde movements of the interwar period.

The project originated during a working meeting between Ramiro Espinoza and Paula Mastrangelo, the partners behind Retype Foundry. They discussed how best to publish display-oriented projects without straying from the stylistic parameters and target audience established for the foundry’s core collection, which focuses on typefaces for editorial and corporate use.

The chosen solution was to create a subsidiary of Retype called Brutal Types, dedicated to exploring the typographic diversity and aesthetic richness of the alphabets produced in the Netherlands during the interwar years.

The next step involved photographing hundreds of façades, commemorative plaques, and tombstones throughout the Netherlands to serve as inspiration for the creation of new fonts. Dozens of books with covers designed by some of the era’s finest designers—such as Fré Cohen, Tine Baanders, and Anton Kurvers—were also acquired. While some typographic interpretations of these trends already exist on the market, the Retype team believes that Dutch Expressionism produced a vast array of experimental forms, many of which have never been digitized and deserve to be revived with care and dedication.

Following this, a team consisting of Nóra Békés, Sabina Chipară, Jacques le Bailly, Jolana Sýkorová, Yomar Augusto, Fabian Kolar, Fabio Pop, Mathis Payet, Daniel Calders, Jakob Fangmeier, and Pilar Gutiérrez Niklison—under the direction of Paula Mastrangelo and Ramiro Espinoza—designed and produced the fifty typefaces we present today, along with many others to be released in the coming months.

We invite you to rediscover the spirit of radical formal exploration that defined the interwar years—and to enrich your typographic palette with this new selection from Brutal Types.