Atlas, an efficient sans serif
with trans-Atlantic charm

Atlas Grotesk was originally designed by Susana Carvalho and Kai Bernau of Atelier Carvalho Bernau, in collaboration with Christian Schwartz, and released in 2012. After using Univers for decades, reinsurance giants Munich Re wanted a clean and respectable new corporate typeface. The client adamantly wanted to avoid the trends in corporate design during the late-aughts, particularly the genre of round-cornered sans serifs that aimed to look friendly and ownable, but instead ended up goofy and disjointed. Munich Re wanted to retain their twentieth-century grotesk roots in a new typeface with narrower proportions and less squareness overall.

Atlas takes its stylistic cues from European grotesks, particularly Mercator by Dirk Dooijes, which was released in 1957 by the Amsterdam Type Foundry. Mercator is something of a lost masterpiece with no definitive digital version available, making it an attractive candidate for reinterpretation. Where Univers is squarish, Mercator’s bowls are round and warm; where the apertures tend to close up in a grotesk, Mercator’s terminals are truncated for better clarity at small sizes and on screen. Mercator also has a handful of stylistic quirks—for example, the short tail on the a and the curve at the top of the t—that add warmth and distinction from other grotesks without resorting to gimmicks that are often the pitfalls of other corporate typefaces.

While its style is derived from European grotesks, Atlas’s vertical proportions are decidedly more similar to the American gothics: Franklin, News, Trade, Record, et al. The relatively long ascenders coupled with very short descenders make the typeface feel spacious and comfortable for extended reading, even when set with tight leading. This economy allows Atlas to save space over the previous corporate face, reducing a significant amount of paper in the process over the hundreds of publications, reports, and other documents produced by Munich Re each year.

Atlas Typewriter came from a more personal interest. The designers explain, “We always loved these obscure weird typefaces, especially Univers Typewriter. There is something irreverent in squishing and stretching the letterforms to the monospaced rhythm, and it adds a completely different tone of voice to the same basic shapes: it feels at once more technical and more humane to us, more like writing than it feels like reading, and we wanted to have that for our own graphic design work as well.”

Carvalho and Bernau explored a monospaced typeface that fell outside the two broad categories that most monospaced typefaces ended up in—the nostalgic tone of a typewriter or the aggressive functionalism of code—instead focusing on a smooth, even texture for comfortable reading. The monospaced face is well suited for a wide range of uses, as varying as art catalogs, personal correspondence, and data visualization. Carvalho and Bernau accomplished this smoothness by stretching and compressing their forms in the simplest way possible. Characters like lowercase f and t are peculiar in their symmetry, extending from left to fill their space. The lowercase r is unadorned with extraneous serifs or terminals. These details make a surprisingly editorial monospace, and like Atlas Grotesk, is drawn for both text and display use. Atlas Typewriter also comes in a full range of six weights from Thin to Black, each with italics and small capitals.