LL Brown owes much to the groundbreaking work of both Edward Johnston and Arno Drescher, whose respective designs – Johnston Sans (1916), and Super Grotesk (1930) – are historically among the most influential geometric sans serifs. The Underground Electric Railways Company of London commissioned Johnston Sans, and after having been adopted as corporate typeface for all of London’s public transport in 1933, the typeface is still in use until today. Super Grotesk had initially been less successful, but it enjoyed considerable success in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after the Second World War, eventually becoming one the most widely used typefaces in East Germany.

As LL Brown demonstrates, the successful fusion of these two typefaces points to a shared cultural heritage only partially overshadowed by the many political and economic antagonisms of the Cold War. Ironically, the ubiquitous public face of Western Europe’s finance capital shared its modernist roots with a typeface that only ever found post-war success in communist Germany. This historical coincidence was recognised by Zurich-based designers and editors Lex Trüb and Urs Lehni, who originally suggested to fuse the two typefaces in 2007.

An overnight success, LL Brown was developed further in the years to follow, with additional Medium and Black weights; formal changes to many glyphs; as well as Greek, Cyrillic, PanEuro, Hebrew and Arabic versions.

Additionally, Aurèle challenged himself to propose monospaced fonts both beautiful and functional for the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. They carry LL Brown’s distinctive aesthetic to a new style, as if it had had an earlier life on a daisywheel cartridge for an electric IBM typewriter.

In 2019, Aurèle revisited a project he had abandoned earlier – to create condensed companions for LL Brown. The result has been published in Spring 2022 as two full families, in Narrow and Condensed proportions. We are currently in the process of producing variable files for the LL Brown, offering fonts with weight, width and slant axes. Please contact us if you are interested.

Upon graduating from ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, in 2004, Aurèle Sack (*1977) went to work in Zurich. At NORM, where he had already interned during his studies, he contributed to the elaboration of a corporate typeface for Swiss watchmaker Omega, as well as to developing LL Purple (2006).

After returning to ECAL in 2010 to teach type design and editorial design, Aurèle became a typographic household name with the publication of his LL Brown (2011), a highly successful and versatile geometric Sans Serif family. He served as a consultant for the redesign of Vogue Homme International, bringing in LL Brown and a new custom development, called Turquoise. He followed up with his third typeface named after a colour, LL Grey (released in 2018).

His type designs won Aurèle the maximum number of three Swiss Design Awards. Focussing on further developing his LL Brown super family, he expanded it to Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese, Hebrew and Arabic scripts, and added Narrow, Condensed, and decorative styles. Aurèle has also created many bespoke typefaces, such as for Swissquote, the successful fintech startup, or for Globus, the luxury department stores.

More recently, he returned to LL Brown to develop it into variable fonts, in the course bringing back the reclining italics which had been part of the inital offering of LL Brown back in 2011. He is currently finalising two typefaces for Lineto, LL Cyan and LL Magenta, very soon to be shared with the public.

Designed by Aurèle Sack (2020). Font engineering and mastering by Lineto. All copyrights, distribution rights and trademarks are the exclusive property of Lineto GmbH.