Produkt by Berton Hasebe and Christian Schwartz

Drawn by Berton Hasebe, Produkt is the slab serif version of the sans Graphik family. This typeface follows the twentieth century tradition of adding slabs to a European Grotesk to create an attractive and functional companion serif typeface. Its serifs are relatively short, particularly in the heaviest weights, so it retains the compact proportions and regular texture that characterize Graphik.

The idea of adding serifs at Graphik at first seemed too obvious, and Christian Schwartz had dismissed the idea out of hand, but demand from users of the original made us speculate that it might be worth exploring. Berton Hasebe’s early sketches had an unexpected charm: the warmth of Graphik shone through, with the shortness of the serifs keeping it from looking clumsy. Hasebe then finished the family to match the full range of weights that make Graphik so useful. The light weights are pretty, the middle weights are functional, and the heavy weights have a feeling of authority, all suffused with the appealing geometry seen in Graphik. A handful of alternates change the overall tone of the typeface to a surprising degree. 

The family made its debut in Ariel Cepeda's redesign of the Sunday edition of Le Matin, a French-language newspaper published in Lausanne, Switzerland. The heaviest weights give punch to section heads, while the other weights give structure to the opinion and sport sections. The light weights are used throughout Femina, the newspaper's weekly magazine for women.