Sanomat’s soft elegance

The redesign was carried out internally, headed up by group creative director Sami Valtere along with art directors Hannu Pulkkinen and Ari Kinnari, and built on a strong grid of square elements. We designed Sanomat to play against the grid, with organic forms that warm up the coldness and precision of the underlying page structure. It’s common to evoke refinement in a typeface by using sharpness and high contrast: pointed serifs and terminals connote elegance, while softness and organic curves impart a warm and casual feeling. Sanomat manages to come off as elegant even though its details – such as the terminals on letters like a, f, g, j, k, r, and y; and the flaring that replaces the serifs of horizontal strokes in capital letters like E, F, L, and T – are soft.

This unusual treatment shows the influence of inscriptionally inspired typefaces like Berthold Wolpe’s iconic Albertus, Hermann Zapf’s divisive Optima, or Joachim Romann’s little-known Romann Schrift. In part this is functional: the Finnish language has many repeating letterforms, such as ää, and the softening reduces visual noise. Additionally, the serifs are quite short, particularly on the diagonal characters, because of the preponderance of vv and yy pairs in Finnish. The word for “goodness,” hyvyys, is an example of the strings of diagonal letterforms the typeface needed to accommodate. 

Sanomat’s gentle curves and humanist sentiment echo Finnish twentieth-century architecture and design. Barnes was inspired by an eclectic group of Finnish designers and illustrators including Alvar Aalto, Eliel Saarinen, Maija Isola, and Tove Jansson. Perhaps this affinity for the warm and unembellished forms of Finnish modernism explains why Sanomat has found a place in corporate branding and the marketing of furniture and housewares. Its elegance has also made it a good fit for beauty and wellness products, and for several seasons of promotions for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

After commissioning high-contrast Banner and low-contrast Slab variants of Sanomat over the next decade, Helsingin Sanomat returned in 2023 with a request for a condensed version, primarily for their monthly magazine Kuukausiliite. Barnes pushed the forms as narrow as he could make them and built a variable font for creative director Tuomas Jääskeläinen and his team to experiment with in layouts. A width close to the middle of the range proved most useful and was completed for their use, but Barnes decided to complete an X Condensed width for release as well, assisted by Tim Ripper, and added a variable version to let designers access all of the widths in between.

Sanomat began as a newspaper face – one tasked with addressing not only the exacting needs of an esteemed daily paper, but also the idiosyncratic visual repetition of the Finnish language and the weight of Finland’s rich design history. Since the family’s release to the wider world in 2017, it has gradually found a place as an elegant headline serif face that lends words both gravitas and warmth. The new condensed widths make Sanomat a more complete family that offers designers a large set of voices to work with.