Piet was inspired by Finnish license plates.
This typeface’s lede had me at Finnish. Call me a sucker for Scandi design and sensibility, from adorable egg cups and everyday housewares to my pandemic Nordic Noir obsession. Why am I surprised that even a utilitarian government-issued vehicle identification has a certain quirky flair?
Piet was designed by Nils Thomsen, co-founder of the German foundry Typemates. Piet is actually a pair of typefaces: Sans and MONO, each with four weights, unconventional italics, and a host of Open Type features: subscripts, fractions, alternate glyphs, and the like. Across the system, Piet shares a love of strange numbers and deep, rounded ink traps.
Piet is bureaucratic at first sight, but with a closer look you’ll find the utilitarian hooked up to the weird, the stiff wired to the wonky, and the italics connected to the battery.
Typemates
MONO is fixed and angular, while Sans offers smoother forms and easier legibility. Stylistic sets both intensify and bridge the gap between the two, creating an ambitious type system that provides designers with a smorgasbord of possibilities: semi serifs for Sans, an alternate ‘a,’ upright italics, and a style set for MONO that intensifies its discordant white space.
At Typemates, you can learn more, play around with Piet, and find out what the foundry team is up to.
