“If Alleanz seems to brush against nonsense,” Italy’s CAST foundry writes, “there’s a reason.”
That reason: Science fiction, where designer Erasmo Ciufo drew inspiration—and put it to use.
One of Ciufo’s friends is a Hollywood screenwriter, and he asked the type designer to create some work for a film he’s developing. The treatment (which you can read an excerpt from here) played a key role in the development of Alleanz, which took the form of a light sans that revels in its oddities.
“Curved strokes swell towards their terminals and travel beyond what’s ‘normal,’” CAST writes. “The details of other letters can feel out of place, like the central bar of ‘g’, which extends over the lower bowl, or the twirling top of ‘f’ and ‘t’. These shapes are mirrored by the bizarre, sophisticated alternates included in Alleanz’s four stylistic sets.”
All told, the typeface’s eccentricities are perfectly in line with the mission of the CAST Studies program that produced it—to showcase personality, “expressive potential” and the experimental … and to feed debate. And at least internally, Alleanz has us talking.
