How will typography emerge in this flat era? It will have to be self-willed, distinct and clear, and speak to the future while mining the past. Designers will be outpaced by credibility, not clout.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Illustration by Juanjo Gasull, The Atlantic, October 16, 2025<\/p>\n
Integrity + Experimental Edge<\/p>\n
Los Angeles based studio Mouthwash Studio<\/a> is reprogramming the neural network architecture of the design studio. Founding Partner and Strategy Director Alex Tan<\/a> explains, \u201cWe\u2019re not a company that\u2019s restricted by the medium, what we technically know how to do, or what we were trained to do in school. We follow a philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n From jump, they\u2019ve had a prescient sense of what design-conscious minds want. That\u2019s evident in their Chinatown space<\/a>, which feels like an Architectural Digest feature and was designed in collaboration with Aunt Studio<\/a>.<\/p>\n Six years back, Tan, joined close friends Mackenzie Tan<\/a>, Abraham Campillo<\/a>, and Ben Mingo<\/a>, forming a podcast series<\/a>, which led the group to publish a creative glossy called Mouthwash, launching in epic fashion to a crowd of 600 spilling into the street. Since then, this high and rising studio continues to be a breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n \u201cCreative currency is the most valuable currency,\u201d says Tan. The Studio\u2019s Findings<\/a> and Mouthwash Research Center<\/a> (MWRC) keeps its original spirit of offbeat experimentation liquid and alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n Their projects are flyers for the world they want to live in. They have revived tastemaking that drove the 1980s NYC art scene and applied it less recklessly to branding, making big universes that serve culture, not themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n For us, even though the campaign is the delivery method, what can we do to make it feel like a whole universe that people step inside of?<\/p>\n Alex Tan<\/p>\n Mouthwash designs for brands like Seed<\/a> and Brand.ai<\/a> with clarity and resonance. The studio\u2019s fingerprints come through in how people experience brands anew, ultimately creating more space for story and voice without deprioritizing design aesthetics.\u00a0<\/p>\n Take Seed. The brand\u2019s position challenge? Showing their humanity. \u201cInstead of using Neue Haas Unica<\/a>, which is very Swiss and very precise, how do we incorporate some level of expression to the typeset?\u201d Tan remarks.<\/p>\n Mouthwash\u2019s Creative Technology Director, Daniel Wenzel, was up for the charge. \u201cHe\u2019s just a genius,\u201d says Tan. Wenzel is a new breed who blends type design with coding to create generative design systems. German-born and based in New York, Wenzel tests how type design can evolve outside of traditional typesetting structures.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI would argue that I\u2019m specialized in systems thinking,\u201d Wenzel says. Continuing, \u201cthat can be brand systems or motion systems. Creative coding is a system, and typefaces are systems as well. You\u2019re not designing individual letters, you\u2019re designing a shape language that is spread throughout the typeface or font family.\u201d<\/p>\n He designed an outcome for Seed that was both groundbreaking and approachable. Working with Dinamo, the team began with the Oracle<\/a> family, an elegant sans serif with friendly, smooth contours and subtle contrasts. It\u2019s also super customizable, with alternates and stylistic sets.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mouthwash Studio (Daniel Wenzel), Seed<\/a> Sans, 2025<\/p>\n Wenzel\u2019s approach is Socratic. He asks, \u201cWhy would we want to make a font from scratch? What they want is features and specific characters that can change the overall flow of a typeface drastically enough to feel unique.\u201d Proving custom type and customizing brand language work hand in hand.<\/p>\n Seed Sans moves fluidly between scientific precision and human expression. With built-in ingenuity, the client gets a simple type tool that enables them to implement their brand optimally. Wenzel notes, \u201cThings can be communicated in line versus trying to figure out that tricky tension point of merging graphic design with typography.\u201d<\/p>\n The team developed a custom character set to express the Seed brand and scientific processes within text, including the capsule, dot, and other sub-brand symbols.\u00a0This is a big shift from past decades, where static logos dominated. <\/p>\n I want all brands to be flexible identity systems and not static brands. That\u2019s the way it was done in the 80s. Now, it\u2019s way more about, What system do you build around?<\/p>\n -Daniel Wenzel<\/p>\n Mouthwash took the same approach with Brand.ai<\/a>, an identity system punctuated by a flexible logomark that is at once infinite and consistent. The aim was to create a living brand, where the brand mark can engage with the content around it with ease.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wenzel used the font editor program Glyphs to design 8 unique logo marks with a variable optical axis that could be assigned to keyboard letters. This vaults from delivering countless static logo files and offers streamlined use. Building systems for a world of behavior is the new wave of generative design thinking.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mouthwash Studio (Daniel Wenzel), Brand.ai<\/a>, 2025.<\/p>\n Raw Materials + Primary Sources<\/p>\n One October Saturday, an LCD panel display caught designer Emily Sneddon\u2019s eye. The material undoneness of the static destination display on San Francisco Muni\u2019s Breda Light Rail inspired Fran Sans<\/a>. It\u2019s a monospaced, display font available in three variations: solid, tile, and panel.\u00a0<\/p>\n The following Spring, Sneddon left her role at Collins, and found herself with a designer\u2019s most rare resource: time. She read in the park, took walks, and had leisurely brunches. As she slowed down, the display letters came back to her: squares, quarter circles, little triangles stacked to make diagonals. She saw beyond the utility and charm of their awkward forms. She observed poetry.<\/p>\n \u201cI have been craving a way to engage more meaningfully in the world, design, and more deeply with my own craft.\u201d Her curiosity became the custom Fran Sans font and, unintentionally, a preservation study, as the Breda trains were phased out altogether just as Sneddon\u2019s project went live. Now this decommissioned train display remains a living font in our world.<\/p>\n Sneddon made Fran Sans her own, though she didn\u2019t feel that way initially. Dave Foster<\/a> mentored her throughout the process saying, \u201cThe very first point that you go from the road that you were on into \u2018I\u2019ve got to make this one decision,\u2019 it becomes your own.\u201d\u00a0 She loved the optimism and celebration of history. Placing her personal voice on this project was something she was missing in brand work.\u00a0<\/p>\n She wrote an illuminating essay<\/a> on the project, along with an elegant case study<\/a>, which features a poem that brings unexpected sentimentality to this utilitarian font. \u201cWhen I\u2019m working, I\u2019m always trying to play with contrasts,\u201d Sneddon says. \u201cYou find interesting collisions and tension. It was far more interesting when I set it in dreamy language.\u201d<\/p>\n From Emily Sneddon Frans Sans Essay<\/a><\/p>\n Throughout the process, Sneddon spoke with sources, visited archives and workshops, and studied original drawings of display mechanisms, eventually connecting with Gary Wallberg, the original senior engineer at Tans-Lite who designed the displays back in 1999. She notes, \u201cIf any one of the people didn\u2019t get involved, I wouldn\u2019t have the knowledge or the story that I have now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\tArchival materials Sneddon sourced at Letterform Archives in S.F.<\/p>\n Citing the work Greek graphic designer Vasilis Marmatakis<\/a> did for Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 film, Bugonia<\/a>, Sneddon emphasizes how critical it is to collaborate with originators when reimagining a font. In developing the graphics and posters, Marmatakis, who also created the designs for The Lobster and Poor Things<\/a>, collaborated with the family of Samoan graphic designer Joseph Churchward<\/a> to digitize his 2002 Churchward Roundsquare<\/a> font. Marmatakis found the perfect font : it was futuristic, monumental, DIY, threatening, and very brutalist.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fran Sans is Sneddon\u2019s first font and most meaningful project. \u201dI\u2019m far more interested in the meandering journey of a designer,\u201d she confesses, recalling Rick Rubin\u2019s philosophy on how ideas attach to us. There is a duty to bring ideas into the world. Otherwise, that idea will go and find someone else.<\/p>\n She wonders, \u201cWhat else is staring us in the face that we don\u2019t even realize have stories attached to them?\u201d<\/p>\n Anti-Commercialism<\/p>\n Wael Morcos of Morcos Key<\/a> doesn\u2019t wait to join the conversation. When something moves him like a political moment, he designs. His custom Arabic signature for Zohran Mamdani\u2019s campaign began as a personal gesture, not a brief. The lettering, which he posted to Instagram days before the election, translated the candidate\u2019s name into Arabic with the visual immediacy of a city sign. The blazing orange letterforms stacked against a hard, electric blue ground are borrowed from the campaign\u2019s original identity created by Forge<\/a>. The name seems to hum, vibrating with the hand-painted spontaneity of New York\u2019s vernacular: bodegas, metro cards, halal carts.<\/p>\n \u201cI love seeing Arabic in public spaces in New York City,\u201d Morcos says. \u201cIt\u2019s a marker of people who speak Arabic, who are from these places in the world that exist here.\u201d His design does more than adorn\u2014it situates. In re\u2011lettering Mamdani\u2019s first name, Morcos introduces a new typography into the civic landscape, merging identity with visibility.<\/p>\n The construction itself sits between two worlds: \u201cIt\u2019s not classical proportions of Arabic calligraphy, and it\u2019s not pure handwriting,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt\u2019s almost Latin, because Latin itself is not handwriting, it\u2019s structured lettering.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The piece isn\u2019t a cursive flow but a drawn, illustrated form. A drop shadow gives it a sculptural energy, a hint of movement borrowed from street lettering traditions. \u201cIt sits in the middle of non\u2011calligraphic Arabic letterforms,\u201d Morcos says, \u201cbut is still heavily inspired by the roots of Arabic calligraphy; drawn with the affectations of a drop shadow and a clear construction, but still expressive with these pointy ends.\u201d<\/p>\n Weal Morcos (Morcos Key), custom Arabic signature made in support of Zohran Mamdani during election week, 2025. Morcos followed the original campaign branding to seamlessly create his addition.<\/p>\n Beneath its immediacy lies deep typographic discipline. Morcos warns that without understanding how letters flow, \u201cyou could see awkward results.\u201d Customization isn\u2019t decoration, it\u2019s anatomy. It\u2019s about drawing with understanding rather than editing for style.<\/p>\n That philosophy threads through Morcos Key\u2019s earlier work for Hammer & Hope<\/a>, a magazine built on the themes of labor, activism, and communal strength. Its custom typeface has a mechanical roughness\u2014part functional tool, part rallying cry.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a kinship here with Gretel\u2019s Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a> revival, which unearthed Sol Hess\u2019s Hess Neobold font from the archives. Customized in collaboration with Ryan Bugden<\/a>, Fairmount Serif merges the museum\u2019s origins as the Pennsylvania Museum & School of Industrial Arts and the city\u2019s working-class heritage with serif details drawn from the museum\u2019s original seal and engraved walls. Both projects look back to move forward, harvesting form from history and hand.<\/p>\n Gretel NY, custom type for Philadelphia Art Museum, 2025. Fairmount Serif is the museum\u2019s new custom institutional typeface, which Gretel designed in collaboration with Ryan Bugden<\/a>. It merges the museum\u2019s origins as the Pennsylvania Museum & School of Industrial Arts (PMSIA) and Philadelphia\u2019s working-class heritage with serif details inspired by the museum\u2019s original seal and engraved walls. It takes cues from Hess Neobold with signatures from contemporary industrial sans-serifs.<\/p>\n What connects them is their resistance to gloss. They echo the living surfaces of the world\u2014painted letters fading on brick, sun\u2011bleached vinyl, the utility of type over the luxury of perfection. In an era when design tools can counterfeit anything, each curve insists on presence. Born of place, belief, and grit, the result is resolutely human. Raw, anti\u2011commercial, and beautifully unrepeatable.<\/p>\n No Stars<\/p>\n TypeTogether<\/a> has been collaborating with designers all over the world for nearly two decades. Founded in 2006 by Veronika\u202fBurian and Jos\u00e9\u202fScaglione, the independent foundry grew from a shared respect for typographic structure and storytelling. The two met at the University of Reading in the UK, where both completed Master\u2019s degrees in type design and began developing what would become a cosmopolitan, research-driven practice. Today, TypeTogether operates as a distributed collective, partnering with designers and language experts across continents to build type systems for the most demanding editorial and digital settings.<\/p>\n So when the foundry decided to reexamine<\/a> Paul Renner\u2019s 1927 classic, Futura<\/a>, with Bauer Types close collaboration, the challenge was never about nostalgia. It was about translation\u2014how to carry an ideology into the present. \u201cFutura is produced by a very special framework,\u201d says Jos\u00e9\u202fScaglione, \u201cthe situation art was in during those years in Germany and Austria. The modernist movement was in itself a reaction and a very important one to the rather ornate or even Baroque style.\u201d Futura didn\u2019t just clean the slate; it redrew the grammar of modernity. \u201cIt was revolutionary,\u201d Scaglione continues, \u201cthe mother of all geometrics\u2014it really coined the genre.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Renner, Futura, 1927. Bauer Types Foundry<\/a><\/p>\n Now, a century later, TypeTogether\u2019s Futura\u00ae100<\/a> extends that legacy across a world that Renner couldn\u2019t have imagined. The project currently spans twelve scripts (with eleven more to come) covering more than ninety percent of the world\u2019s population. Each script has been designed with native consultants, typographers, and proofreaders to ensure accuracy and cultural fluency. Burian notes, \u201cFor every script, given the importance of this project, we had additional consultants for each script. So it\u2019s not just a designer, but also another pair of eyes who is native in the language. It\u2019s a check and balance.\u201d<\/p>\n That humility defines the project\u2019s ethics. It\u2019s an exercise in empathy\u2014mapping Renner\u2019s principles of simplicity, economy, and proportion into typographic systems with entirely different rules.<\/p>\n We\u2019re not trying to impose purist design into other scripts, rather, we try for these other scripts to appropriate the conceptual framework that would make their shapes work.<\/p>\n Veronika Burian<\/p>\n The result is quiet innovation alchemized from hours of archive visits. Where most centennial projects lead with branding, Futura\u00ae100 leads with listening. It recovers the design\u2019s underlying humanity rather than its myth. In Scaglione\u2019s words, the original Futura was born as \u201can engine of that clearing\u2011out process,\u201d a reduction to essentials. That same spirit now guides its rebirth\u2014not as a celebrity font, but as a connective tissue for written and visual culture worldwide.<\/p>\n Type Together, archival visits to research Paul Renner\u2019s original Futura font. Futura\u2019s archives are spread across various institutions, including Bauer Types<\/a> (official rights holder for original designs), Bauhaus-related archives<\/a>, German typographic museums<\/a>, Letterform Archive<\/a>, and university collections like McGill University<\/a>. Each location has varied samples of Renner\u2019s drawings, metal letters, and other original type setting materials.<\/p>\n What makes the work radical is its invisibility. TypeTogether\u2019s update isn\u2019t out to make Futura famous again; it\u2019s out to make it useful everywhere. To return the modernist idea of clarity as dignity for readers in every language. No branding fireworks, no stylistic remix. Just a century\u2011long conversation renewed in dozens of alphabets. No stars, just type.<\/p>\n Universal, Ancient Truths<\/p>\n Typography that imprints on the year ahead will broadcast universal, ancient truths. Exponentially, designers will push type towards more generative behavior, rooted in human ingenuity not artificial slush.\u00a0<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a shift, it\u2019s an ascension. As Tan of Mouthwash articulates, \u201cour main mission is to influence culture, and the only way to do that is to pay attention to what stories, behaviors, or ways of interacting are both ancient and true.\u201d<\/p>\n 2026 will not just redefine how type is set but propel brand language farther with customizable systems, signaling an anti-pop, art-focused direction, countering archaic agency methods in favor of authentic experimentation. Depth over stardom. Considered not contrived. Less plucking, more diving. Tastemaking not trendsetting. Ingenuity over artificiality.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Typography traces our shared humanity, which is miraculous and mundane. Falling in love. Riding public transport. New ideas are born from old ideas.<\/p>\n Everything we make comes from things that have existed prior to us. We all come out of the womb a potato. Everything we know has been given to us.<\/p>\n Emily Sneddon<\/p>\n Tonal shifts from one brand touchpoint to another are evidence of a brand\u2019s emotional agility. Designers have a choice: create a million dollar typographic expression that shapes culture or a ten cent font that imitates it.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Mouthwash-Studio-Interior.jpg\")
Mouthwash Studio<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/SeedProduct.jpg\")
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Mouthwash Studio (Daniel Wenzel), Seed<\/a> Sans, 2025<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/MoodBoard-1.jpg\")
Mouthwash Moodboard for Brand.ai<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/FranSans_EmilySneddon_Alphabet-1.png\")
Emily Sneddon, Fran Sans<\/a>, 2025<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/FranSans_EmilySneddon_Styles.png\")
Emily Sneddon, Fran Sans<\/a>, 2025<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/FranSans_EmilySneddon_tiles.png\")
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Archival Trans-Lite Inc. blueprint of display design<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Churchward-Round-Print-negative-1.png\")
The Bugonia typeface, Churchward Roundsquare. Originally designed by Samoan designer Joseph Churchward in 2002<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Begonia-Poster.jpg-1.png\")
Film Poster, Vasilis Marmatakis for Yorgos Lanthimos\u2019 Bugonia, featuring on set photography by Yorgos Lanthimos and Atsushi \u2018Jima\u201d Nishhijima.
(Image credit: Courtesy Vasilis Marmatakis)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/zohran-mamdani-campaign-branding-logo-design.jpg\"){kind=logo}
Branding for Zohran Mamdani Campaign, by Forge<\/a>, 2025. Designer Aneesh Bhoopathy drew heavily from vernacular New York visuals: \u201cTaxicab yellow, MetroCard primary colors, bodega awnings \u2014 stuff people are familiar with in the New York street.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Morcos_Zohran-04.jpg\")
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Morcos Key, Hammer & Hope, custom typeface, characterized by a monospaced alphabet and precisely crafted half-spaced gaps. It imparts a resolute rhythm, while maintaining an earnest and authentic expression.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Fairmont_Sol_Hess.png.webp.png\")
Hess Neobold<\/a> font, 1933. An American typeface combining industrial and classical qualities, cut by typeface designer and art director Sol Hess (1886-1953). Hess was a lifelong resident of Philly, and studied at the PMSIA for three years and became Frederic Goudy\u2019s successor at Lanston Monotype.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Gretel-NY_Philly-Museum.webp.jpeg\")
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Type Together, Futura\u00ae100<\/a>, 2025<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Group-1-3.png\")
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