LL Circular

“LL Circular successfully marries purity with warmth and strikes a balance between functionality.” —Lineto

a geometric sans serif

LL Circular is “serious, timeless, and neutral” (Shaykin). The geometric sans serif font references simple geometry with beautiful, timeless forms. Including an extensive family, LL Circular has the ability to be used in a variety of formats. The family also includes a handful of additional glyphs that play with the simple geometry of lines and dots, as well as, a set of Roman numerals. Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Devanagari extensions are currently in development.

LL Circular’s forms are pleasing to the eye, even in the lightest and boldest weight. Designer Benjamin Shaykin remarks, “But oh, the lowercase ‘t’! I adore the lowercase ‘t’. The intersection of stem and crossbar is perfectly rounded, suggesting the slightest hint of Clarendon or Century. And it is this subtle softness that gives the typeface away” (Shaykin). LL Circular is the second typeface to be released from the Swiss foundry, Lineto. LL Circular is a geometric Sans Serif font with a family of sixteen weights. LL Circular’s forms are drawn from Futura, Neuzeit Grotesk, and other 20th-century fonts. The process of developing the font began in 2008, and since has evolved from its original very geometric forms. The final version of the typeface was unveiled in 2013. The round and simple forms of the typeface are neutral without being boring, “Circular doesn’t draw attention to itself” (Shaykin).

LL Circular has made appearances in Brunner’s The Most Beautiful Swiss Books series of 2007–09, the Conditional Design: Workbook, and the pages of the New York Times Magazine.

Laur Bru

“Form and function always go hand in hand. I cannot arrive at a solution which is purely functional or purely formal.” —Laurenz Brunner

enz Designer Biography unner

Laurenz Brunner is the creative behind LL Circular. It is Laurenz Brunner’s second release after his popular typeface, LL Akkurat. Brunner released the font to Lineto in 2013. Brunner got his start in type as an apprentice in Switzerland and later took on an internship in London. Brunner also worked for Tate Modern, an institution that includes a network of four art museums, under the art director James Goggin from 2002–2003.

During his studies at Central Saint Martins, Brunner devloped LL Akkurat, which was published in 2004. He moved to Amsterdam in 2005 to finish his BA studies at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Brunner also developed identities for the Paris book fair Offprint (2010), the Arnhem Mode Biennale (2011, with Julia Born), and for Gavin Brown Enterprise, New York (2011, with Geoff Han). In 2018, Brunner relocated to Zurich, where he launched Source Type.

Lineto Type Foundry

Lineto was founded in 1993 by Cornel Windlin and Stephan Müller as a way for the two designers to combine their individual type creations. Lineto.com was developed and released in 1998 as a way to distribute their typefaces to the public and allow other designers to publish their fonts. The name Lineto is a term borrowed from the PostScript™ page description language.

“Today, Lineto connects an illustrious group of designers from the US to Ukraine, with the youngest being 20 and the oldest 83 years old. Lineto is dedicated to the research, design, development and production of original typefaces, unique in concept, exquisite in design, and flawless in production” (Lineto).

A closer look at LL Circular

The strokes on some of the letterforms, such as b, d, h, m, n, p and q, have thin to thick strokes that connect the shoulder to the stem. The letterform has seen above, shows how these strokes vary in different weights.

LL Circular has short descenders, that keep the short, geometric shapes in tact. Overall, the letterforms have a slightly small x-height.

Descender

LL Circular is a beautiful, rounded, sans serif. Its properties are based on round, geometric, forms. Even its name, Circular, describes the unique rounded forms that mimic circles. The counters of the letter forms are perfectly circular, as are the tittles on letterform i. The only letterform that strays from these round counters is the letterform, a, which has a beautiful teardrop double story bowl.

X-height