Postea: An Inspiring Venture

Today, we would like to share with you the story of Postea: An Inspiring Venture, which starts with Veronika Burian, Munich-based type designer, sometime in Spring 2020 during Covid lockdown. In Germany, outdoor sports and activities were still allowed and going for a walk was a highlight of her day. One venture led Veronika to discover an unfamiliar part of the city. Here in the middle of a large and usually busy public square stands a 1920s post office building in the architectural style of “Neue Sachlichkeit,” commonly known as Bauhaus.

It is no surprise that Germany might inspire a new geometric sans serif design; this is, after all, where everything began in the early twentieth century. During a period marked by a reaction against the industrial context that shaped society, the revolutionary Bauhaus instead prioritized the unity of function and form in art and design, ergonomics, and architecture.

Postea is a rather small type family, but smaller, in this case, does not mean either simpler or less accomplished. The challenge is represented in the typographic goal of the new typeface: Postea is meant to have outstanding performance in a wide range of situations from branding, indoor signage, and posters, to magazines, and books on photography, and architecture. In practice, this creates a couple scenarios that demand different levels of volume and tone with which the fonts must speak to the reader.

The intermediate weights of the Postea type family are intended for applications that demand high readability, and the extreme styles are geared to produce impact and recognition. The game Postea continuously plays is to find a balance between the two extremes of readability and charisma, so a small amount of stylistic alternates were included to give designers the ability to easily tilt the scale one way or another.

Postea’s 14 static styles, or two variable fonts, feature a Latin character set with support for over 140 languages and plenty of typographic goodies: small capitals, symbols, currency, and numerals, superior, and inferior characters, plus the usual ligature and fraction support. As a bonus, in the most widely used office apps, users can quickly access the icons by simply typing the icon name and applying Stylistic Set 05. Inspiration for the icons comes from geometry, art deco, and the use of specific icons related to museums and art.

Postea: An Inspiring Venture

Designer: Veronika Burian
Foundry: Type Together 
Release: May 2021
File Formats: OTF, WOFF, WOFF2
Styles, widths, weights: 14 Styles, 7 weights and matching italics
Price single style: € 44.10 Euro
Price bundle: € 397.– Euro
Buy

You can read more about the creation of Postea here and try it on TypeTogether’s type tester now!