Responses by Panos Vassiliou, type designer and head of creative, Parachute Type Foundry.
Background: Designed to address the visual needs of an ever-demanding corporate environment in a straightforward manner, PF Handbook Office is the go-to font for business-related creative tasks. Targeted for designers who strive for time-efficient tools in their daily workflow, the font is a typographic asset with unparalleled dual efficiency in two versions: a static version consisting of ten fonts, from light to black, including true italics that are ideal for hardcore corporate use; and a variable version for diverse digital promotional applications.
Design thinking: To create a corporate-oriented type design with an unpretentious yet notably recognizable character and style.
Challenges: PF Handbook Office is an exquisitely well-balanced and versatile typeface that works well in body text and headlines within a long range of point sizes. As a new addition into a type family that’s evolving and expanding from our already popular PF Handbook typography realm, our biggest challenge was to carefully evaluate which details of PF Handbook Office to optimize and which to omit. I’m truly pleased with the outcome; this typeface grew into a robust, coherent variable-type design family on its own, incorporating many assets of massively cost-effective technology to the max.
Favorite details: PF Handbook Office’s primary attributes are its subtly rounded corners and a variety of distinct design elements—evident in several characters, such as k and m—that provide utter legibility. The type family retains its sharpness: its inner corners and junction points are left steep to optimize this quality. PF Handbook OFfice’s comfortable spacing and simplified letterforms exert its distinct visual tone as a whole, making each one of its characters essential elements of a cohesive, nonwordy, visual system with a strong welcoming presence.
Crafted to be an essential tool for any brand with a global audience, PF Handbook Office will carry out any international design needs with efficiency. Keeping in mind the abundance of large international corporations whose messaging needs to be conveyed globally with a cohesive visual appeal, the typeface’s release is enhanced with Greek and Cyrillic characters, while an Arabic version is in the works as well.
New lessons: Building a type system with a corporate genome at its core was a unique challenge in practicing to keep my appetite for typographic excellence as pure as possible. I carefully engineered PF Handbook to avoid a time-consuming, inefficient workload; rather, the type design process was a purifying experience where I learned to be as clean-cut and austere as possible, removing any unnecessary design assets.
Visual influences: Taking its cues from DIN and Futura—two type designs that have repleted the business world for the past 20 years, if not longer—PF Handbook Office offers a fresh, unadorned alternative to the simple monolinear genre with a distinct personality. It may not be instantly evident in its individual letters but rather in its appearance as a whole on the printed page or digital screen.
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