Working With Type

Babetta is a display typeface that comes with some decorative typographical features. Alongside a set of arrows and flower icons, it also includes an alternative ›E‹, some special diacritic marks, a wavy ›S‹ and a series of ligatures. This typographical tool box provides a large and playful variety of options for headlines and logotypes.

The design of Babetta started with a concept for uppercase letters. The lower case alphabet was added later.

Babetta features 5 weights and a special ›Neon‹ version with layer weights.

Babetta Type Family Weights

Idea

The initial inspiration for Babetta was an illuminated vintage shop sign—that of a famous bookstore in Berlin called ›Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung‹ that dates back to the days of East Germany. During the course of the design process, this slightly shabby historical original was kissed by an Italian Art Deco beauty and has blossomed into a new typeface with its own special charm. The aim was not to preserve the original lettering, but to use it as a starting point for typographical exploration.

Babetta Buchhandlung

Features

For ›Neon‹ there are 3 styles with exactly the same metrics, so it is easily possible to apply different colors to the layers.

Babetta Type Family Neon

There is a round alternative version of ›E‹, accessible by the OpenType feature Stylistic set 01.

Babetta Type Family Stylistic Set 1

Babetta contains alternative versions for scandinavian diacritics and german umlauts. This feature is reachable by Stylistic set 03 in InDesign or the glyphs menu.

Babetta Type Family Stylistic Set 3


The fonts contain a bunch of decorative ligatures. These can be accessed by the Discretionary ligatures feature. Especially the 2-letter-S-, 3-letter-S- and 4-letter-double-S-combinations are unique. But there is a lot more to combine! The wavy ›S‹ is hidden in the Stylistic set 02 and there is also a version for ›SS‹.

Babetta Ligatures

Arrow feature: The fonts make it easy to create arrows with the keyboard. For an arrow to the right just type ->, arrow to the left is <-, arrow up is -^ and arrow down ^-. In the same manner it is easy to get a real copyright sign (C) or registered sign (R). This works with Discretionary ligatures feature, which must be switched on in the Adobe applications.

Babetta Type Family Arrow Feature

A set of flower icons in every font is accessible via the glyph palette in InDesign.

Babetta Type Family Flower Icons

The font family comes with a large set of ligatures and supports Latin and Cyrillic languages.


Babetta is available at MyFonts and Fontspring.


Links

Medium article about Babetta
PAGE magazine (2019)
PAGE magazine (2013)