The final gem: TypeMates round out the iconic Cera Super Family with their release of Cera Mono

With the introduction of its sleek monospaced font, TypeMates have completed the final piece of the Cera Super Family puzzle – an extensive collection of typefaces that have been meticulously developed and expanded over the past decade. To mark the release of Cera Mono, we caught up with the Germany-based foundry to delve into the origins of the project and trace the evolution of their renowned type family. Cera’s journey began in 2015 when Jakob Runge, a founding partner at TypeMates, felt a welcome change was needed after years of working on his detailed and diverse master’s thesis. He introduced Cera Pro as a geometric sans serif typeface that supported Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, a refreshing change in the typographic landscape and was embraced for its clear geometry and balanced utility. “Cera’s geometry has humanist influence,” explains Nils Thomsen, Partner and Type Designer at TypeMates. “Like how Antiqua text fonts have quite small uppercase letters, or a ‘Q’ with a prominent tail. Also letters like ‘a’ and ‘e’ are kind of human. The result is a clean and geometric face that brings along elegance and a certain warmth – a friendly attitude and classic details.” Since its inception, the Cera Super Family has evolved into a vast collection of typefaces, including Cera Pro, Cera Stencil, Cera Brush, Cera Round and the latest edition – Cera Mono. Each typeface has its own unique story and was developed in collaboration with various designers. For instance, Cera Stencil was designed to elevate stencil types beyond cargo and military clichés, whereas Cera Brush was introduced to bring a hand-crafted, brush-made geometric font with high-res details. The latter was created with the help of Max Kostopoulos, an art director in Munich with a strong focus on analogue design techniques. “Several versions of letters were drawn with different brushes,” explains Runge, describing the process behind it, “and some studies on the optimal conversion of the analogue grayscale images into monochrome vectors were necessary to realise Cera Brush.” According to Kostopoulos, the OpenType ligature feature has been coded to ensure these variations are used automatically, rotating three variants of each letter in a rhythm that further mixes consonants and vowels.