Sanserata

Dr Gerard Unger expands the concept of Alverata to a sans type family with Sanserata, adding specific characteristics which improve reading. Sanserata’s originality does not overtly present itself at text sizes. Rather, at those sizes, it draws upon its enormous x-height, short extenders, and articulated terminals to improve readability, especially on screens.

Having articulated terminals means characters flare as they near their end, but readers likely won’t notice. What they would notice is that their ability to take in more content in a line of text is improved because the lettershapes are more defined. Articulation also makes clearer text from digital sources, where rectangular endings tend to get rounded by the emission of light from the screen.

Lately there seems a whispered discontent with the lack of progress in the sans serif category. Designs can either stretch too far beyond what is accepted or be too bland to be considered new. Sanserata’s strength is in being vivid and unique without being off-putting. This bodes well for designers of paragraphs and of branding schemes since, with Sanserata’s two flavors, it is well able to capture attention or simply set the tone. Sanserata’s first voice is a generous, friendly, and even cheerful sans serif. But when using the alternate letterforms its voice becomes more businesslike, though still with nice curves, generous proportions, and a pleasant character.

Sanserata comes in seven weights with matching italics, covers the Latin Extended character set, and is loaded with extras. Its OpenType features allow for the implementation of typographic niceties such as small caps, both tabular and proportional lining and oldstyle figures, ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive variants, and fractions. The complete Sanserata family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses. Dr Unger worked with Tom Grace on the production of Sanserata.