Tempel Grotesk
From the Foundry:
“Tempel Grotesk, another concoction from the LAB, is a blocky black sans in four widths. All that ink creates a fantastically heavy page with rich texture popping through the counterforms—even better when you mix widths in the same design. Individual characters are also worth highlighting as graphic devices all their own—start with the authoritative cap G and the lowercase r—it feels wonderfully machined.”
Foundry Images:
NOTES:
I’ve always enjoyed the results of Production Type’s LAB wing. I appreciate the releases as results of experiments, play, and trying new things, as well as a chance to show some personal perspective and style that more commercially-geared releases tend to shed by the time they leave the nest. Tempel is a great example of restraint in type design. One weight, four widths, it would be easy to go crazy and start to cheat corners and make things a little crazy, but Reymund Schroder has done a careful job of walking the line between exploring new places for personality in a dense style like this and just creating a revival of Eurostyle.
They use the phrase ‘wonderfully machined’ in the description, and I’d say that’s on the whole true. (Personally, I feel like wonderfully machined is a strange term to begin with, there’s something odd about it, but perhaps I’m more of a humanist?) The little moments they’ve carved out of the counters and what could be otherwise very awkward spaces like the counter space created by the r, the f, or the y, are flipped into moments of harmony and expression amidst the densely black color of the reading line. I really enjoy how the type works in all-caps text. It feels precise, and warm. (Is that what they mean by ‘wonderfully machined’? Am I finally getting it?) Overall, a solid addition to the typographic landscape and the Production Type catalog in more ways than one.