F37® Foundry launches F37 Ginger Mono with a nostalgia-tinged roster of character-driven sticker packs

“F37 Ginger has been one of our most popular typefaces to date,” reveals Design Director Duncan Gravestock, “so developing a Mono version felt like a natural progression.” Ginger Mono joins the UK-based foundry’s roster, designed to maintain the versatility and completeness of the original F37 Ginger family, which includes Regular, Soft, and Rounded styles. “Rather than reinventing it with a bunch of new design elements,” Designer Keelin Wright continues, “[the type designers] focused on preserving as much of the original ‘Ginger-ness’ as possible. The challenge was to squash and stretch the existing letterforms into a fixed mono width while keeping their character intact.” Letters like the ‘m’ and ‘w’ needed to be tightly condensed, while narrower ones like ‘I’ and ‘r’ needed to be extended (or have extra details, like serifs). This culminated in a comprehensive exploration of monospaced typography that, above all, remains faithful to the original’s DNA. While it would have been easy enough to make a specimen or publication to promote the typeface, F37® Studio (the foundry’s sister design agency) has always embraced a more playful approach, manifesting in creative executions like Rubik’s cubes for F37 Qbik and sticks of rock for F37 Britain. “Type design has become increasingly screen-based,” notes Gravestock. “We try to bring a more tactile and playful approach by turning specimens into objects people actually want.” For this typeface launch, he explains that the team looked to the Garbage Pail Kids collectables, citing the joy of collecting stickers as a kid in the ’90s. “It was all about the rush of not knowing what you’d get until the seal was broken. Garbage Pail Kids were a big influence at the time. The gross character, wild illustrations and the feeling that you were holding something you probably shouldn’t made them even more exciting to collect.” Inspired by the cult phenomenon, F37® Studio has created its own series of 24 grotesque characters (the ‘Monomob’), each sporting the typeface’s defining feature – a monobrow. “The idea of Ginger Mono(brows) pretty much screamed at us early on when we were brainstorming PR ideas, it felt like a no-brainer to run with such an obvious and funny execution,” adds Wright. The characters, all sharing the initials ‘GM’ for Ginger Mono, range from the unsettling Ghastly Marcy to the hirsute Grizzly Morgan – a walking mass of ginger hair. Each character comes complete with their own bizarre backstory and traits, “with the goal of bringing out that fun, unsettling side of each character whilst making them as grotesque and memorable as possible,” she notes.