While designing his typeface Tresor, Christoph Koeberlin sketched a very special and particular ‘a’. It took a more straightforward and clean design direction and found itself in the tradition of German grotesque typefaces, but retained an anarchistic core: the slight overhang, the gentle top-heaviness, the minimal contrast, the smile and wink in the curves. It was these promising details that Koeberlin later wanted to explore.

He ended up doing this together with Gabriel Richter. First, Richter tried out different directions from the a. ‘You can only judge a design course if you follow it consistently,’ is how he describes his role as the driving force behind the project. Very quickly they came to the same realization that the ‘roundness’ would be a distinctive strength of the typeface and that this would make Tausend refreshingly modern.

Tausend is not a revival but a homage. The small apertures, gentle top-heaviness, curved feet and ‘angular’ curves make Tausend proud, loud and confident. Tausend offers a comprehensive and infinitely versatile system that is at the forefront of variable font technology and includes over 1000 variable weights and glyphs to play with, including 100 extra-bold weights marked with the label ‘Too Black’ (a treasure trove for anarchists and avant-gardists).

Six subfamilies are provided: Parallel to the ‘classic’ Tausend with the optical size of Plakat, there is Tausend Soft, the first large static grotesque family with discreetly rounded corners, which has been developed in the same way.

Two other versions are aimed at use in larger sizes—an elegant Stencil version and Tausend Shaded, a grotesque, whose shadows adapt visually to the weight. Tausend Stencil was also developed as a variable font with two axes, one of which offers 800 weights whose gaps or bars can be widened or narrowed in 40 steps via the second axis.