Balanced and sexy: Superior Type’s Restart Hard and Soft add new flavour to the neo-grotesque genre

“We wanted the font to look balanced and sexy at the same time,” reveals Founder & Type Designer Vojtech Ríha about Superior Type’s sans serif release, Restart. For quite some time, Ríha, who founded the Prague-based foundry in 2013, wanted to create a neo-grotesque typeface to add to both add to the arsenal of eclectic typefaces that live in his foundry, and also explore the possibilities of its drawing and construction. “We have a large range of typefaces that work great as display or headline fonts, and now we want to focus more on fonts for more versatile use,” he notes. The result of this creative exploration is Restart – and its two variants, simply named Hard and Soft – that holds all the potential of a flexible, dynamic workhorse. “Restart has evenly distributed shading, so it feels more balanced than the original grotesques,” notes Ríha, quickly adding, “what this means is that some older grotesques, such as Helvetica, have a fairly significant difference in thickness between horizontal and vertical strokes, especially in bolder styles. With Restart, we tried to eliminate this ratio as much as possible.”