Fresh off the grill: Contrast Foundry and TOOOT whip up their mix-and-match specimen Hamburgerfonts

Most type designers will be familiar with ‘hamburgerfonts,’ a quirky little term that showcases the unique features of a typeface. As Contrast Foundry’s Founder & Creative Director Maria Doreuli explains, “Similar to how ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ contains every letter in the alphabet, Hamburgefonstiv is a made-up word often used to demonstrate the key characteristics of the letters in the Latin alphabet. But as type designers, we often type it as Hamburgerfonts – because that’s exactly what it reminds you of :)” Here, Contrast Foundry (CoFo) embrace this unconventional ‘hamburgerfonts’ idea wholeheartedly, partnering up with The Office of Ordinary Things (TOOOT) to produce a type specimen of the foundry’s retail catalogue, centred around ‘hamburger fonts.’ With a playful, illustrative style, each typeface from Contrast Foundry’s retail collection is categorised into one of three hamburger-inspired groups – protein (display type), veggies (body type), and condiments (supportive type). For visual inspiration, the team visited the Letterform Archive in San Francisco, where Doreuli also teaches type design. “Our friend Stephen Coles showed us some of his favorite type specimens,” Founder of TOOOT, Jonny Black, tells us, including a mix-and-match book consisting of a face divided into three panels (eyes, nose, and mouth) on the left/verso, each paired with a corresponding typeface on the right/recto.”