Communicating heritage – The character shapes pay homage to the old templates for type on Swedish road signs, while also looking fresh and appealing to a contemporary audience.
Munken
Genius Loci Revisited
Our track record for original typefaces led JUNO to commission a new corporate font for Arctic Paper’s Munken brand, based on the historical letterforms on Swedish road signs. Type designers Laurenz Brunner and Selina Bernet developed a family of three weights for wide use, which generated more than 15.000 free downloads. We added an in-depth research publication exploring the unmapped territory and genealogy of Swedish road signs with designers Jonas Williamsson and Rikard Heberling.
Client: Arctic Paper
Agency: JUNO, Hamburg
Introduced: 2021/2025
Wide applicability – Transforming the single-weight display typeface into a three-weights family for title and body text setting was part of the challenge in the design process.
Research contribution – Expanding the collaborative project, an in-depth historical study relying on a trove of hitherto unpublished sources investigated the making of the early versions of the typeface at the Swedish department for road traffic.
Service to the community – The corporate typeface carries Munken’s interaction with the design community, via the Munken CoLab, and it was distributed for free during an initial three-month period.
Photography and typographic animations provided by Juno. Tratex source material and research publication by Lineto.