Titus Schulz understands what makes a good text typeface legible. Drawing on 25 years of experience as a book designer and inspired by his own calligraphic handwriting, which he got introduced to at ArtEZ Academy of Arts Arnhem, he designed Merwede.
Merwede is not a revival. Many of its features are unconventional and unique. They stem from Schulz’s dissatisfaction with details in classic book typefaces, like italic capitals. (In Merwede, the italic capitals stand one degree more upright than the lowercase so they don’t appear to lean against the lowercase.) References and inspiration have been early Renaissance typefaces and the work of typographers and type designers such as Pierre Simon Fournier, Eric Gill, Jan van Krimpen, Helmut Salden and Martin Majoor, without following any particular model.
In addition to the three standard weights Regular, Medium and Bold, Merwede – named after a river in the west of The Netherlands – includes an intermediary weight called ‘Firm’. Merwede Firm is slightly heavier than Merwede Regular and was designed for posters, inscriptions or reversed-out text. All weights set to the same width so changes in the font weight won’t cause any reflow.
A unique feature of Merwede is the full set of musical chord symbols, which Schulz finds unfavourably designed in almost all music books. ‘Why are the sharp, flat and all necessary chord symbols missing in typefaces? Almost all music books are miserable shaped when it comes to these symbols.’
All this, plus an extensive set of OpenType features make Merwede a true, very charming workhorse.
Designer
Titus Schulz
2024
Merwede supports the following languages
Afrikaans, Albanian, Asu, Basque, Bemba, Bena, Bosnian, Catalan, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, Ganda, German, Gusii, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inari Sami, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jola-Fonyi, Kabuverdianu, Kalaallisut, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lower Sorbian, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Northern Sami, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Scottish Gaelic, Sena, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Turkmen, Upper Sorbian, Vunjo, Walser, Welsh and Zulu.
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