Type West Online, Term 1, Spring 22
Schleiferei
Oskar Phuong Nguyen
Schleiferei (grinding shop) is a revival of Trajanus. For this project, I referenced 2 main sources, Trajanus Specimen from Stempel type foundry and the book “Das Triptychon von den Heiligen Drei Königen” from Insel Publisher, 1966.
Trajanus was drawn by Warren Chappell using the broad nib pen and released in 1939 by Stempel and Linotype. Due to its strong caligraphic quality, Trajanus is sharp and expressive at a display size. On smaller scales, Trajanus lost its sharpness to ensure the harmony of text. To achieve legibility without sacrificing the calligraphic quality of the typeface, I kept the original details of the 60 points size and referred to the proportions and texture of the 12 points size.
Trajanus inherits many quirky features and unusually narrow letters, which are distracting at a text size. During my revival, I made sure to tackle these problems. As a native Vietnamese speaker, I couldn’t help but develop Vietnamese language support for Schleiferei.
Oskar Phuong Nguyen
Phuong Nguyen/Oskar is a Vietnamese design student based in Germany. He is currently pursuing his BA in Communication Design at Hochschule Rhein-Waal
