TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:39:45 EDT 2024

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ABOUT

Soffi Beier

Sofie "Soffi" Beier graduated from Danmarks Designskole (The Danish School of Design) in 2000, and has since been working as a graphic designer, designing several Danish magazines, websites, books and CD covers along with a number of typefaces. She has a PhD from the Royal College of Art in the UK, with a thesis entitled Legibility and Visual Compensation of Typefaces. Sofie works in London and Copenhagen. She teaches at Danmarks Designskole.

Author of Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility (2012) and Type Tricks (2017).

Designer of these typefaces:

• The 8-style sans family Engel (2005). Followed by Engel New Sans (2010, at Die Gestalten), Engel New Serif, and eventually, Engel New (2017, The Northern Block).
• Pemba Script (2005, Die Gestalten). A connected 1950s era script.
• The rounded sans typeface family Ovink (2011). Published in 2017 by The Northern Block. It was loosely inspired by Knud V. Engelhardt's work for the street signage, designed around the years 1926-27 for Gentofte in Denmark. Named after legibility expert Gerrit Willem Ovink, the family was designed for legibility at great distances based on research published by Beier in Beier, S.&Larson, K. (2010): "Design Improvements for Frequently Misrecognized Letters", Information Design Journal, 18(2), 118-137.
• That same research was used in the calligraphic text typeface Spencer (2011, The Northern Block), which was named after legibility expert Herbert Spencer.
• Pyke (2011, released by The Northern Block in 2021). A 12-style Bodoni-inspired variation (with optical scaling: Display, Text, Micro) on the didones, named after legibility researcher Richard Lionel Pyke. Spencer and Pyke are two phenomenal contributions to the field, sure to garner her a closetful of awards.
• The sans / serif / open typeface family Karlo (2015, at Die Gestalten). Karlo is inspired by Edward Johnston's letter forms and calligraphy and has the characteristic Gill Sansian ear of the lower case g. In 2018, it was republished by The Northern Block. She writes: In Denmark, a guy named Karlo would typically be an old fellow with a slick hairstyle that makes an effort with his appearance. He is a handyman who can do a bit of this and that when needed. He is a happy go lucky kind of guy that takes one day at a time. To me, the typeface family has some of the same qualities.

Speaker at ATypI 2011 in Reykjavik. Speaker at ATypI 2013 in Amsterdam on the subject of typeface legibility. Her talk at ATypI 2014 in Barcelona was entitled The voice of a typeface. Speaker at ATypI 2014 in Barcelona. Speaker at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw on The legibility of letters and words and at ATypI 2017 in Montreal on The legibility of numerals. Speaker at ATypI 2018 in Antwerp on the topic of stroke weight and letter width. Speaker at ATypI 2019 in Tokyo on the topic of Age-Related Deficits and Their Effects on Reading.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Soffi Beier
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ The Danish type scene ⦿ Readability & Legibility ⦿ Type design in the United Kingdom ⦿ Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Books on type design ⦿ Eric Gill and his typefaces ⦿