Delegate by Shiva Nallaperumal

Delegate, a hardworking sans serif by designer Shiva Nallaperumal, celebrates his love of Bell Gothic and other anonymous, highly functional grotesques that manage to be invisible in spite of being made of idiosyncratic shapes. Originally created as the house typeface for November, the design practice Nallaperumal runs with Juhi Vishnani, Delegate has functionalism both as a purpose and as an aesthetic. The family comes in seven weights with matching italics in both proportional and monospaced variants, for a total of twenty-eight styles.

Like the late Tibor Kalman, designer Shiva Nallaperumal appreciates boring typefaces. Largely unnoticed, these are typefaces that do the drudge work—the typefaces of telephone books, classified ads, interoffice memos, and stock listings. But take a close look at these ostensibly drab designs. Their underlying contradiction is that by working so hard to be legible and readable, they end up having strong personalities in spite of themselves. 

A desire to understand this tension led Shiva to embark on an in-depth analysis of agate typefaces, tiny 5.5pt printing types that were the early-nineteenth-century invention of Scottish-American typefounder and printer George Bruce. An agate’s job is to predict and mitigate ink spread by introducing compensatory defenses like wide-open counters, deep arches, and notches into letterforms to preserve their identity under trying conditions. When set small, such corrective tactics are invisible. When set large, though, such methods take on a life of their own, yielding great expressivity and an unwitting beauty. Delegate, an amalgam of disparate ideas and influences, is Shiva’s celebration of this apparent paradox.