Carvalho Bernau

Munich Re Sans

Commissioned by German reinsurer Munich Re and their external consultant Marcus Maurer of Keller Maurer Design. Munich Re asked us to draw a new typeface for all corporate design matters that was to replace a customised version of Univers. For this assignment, we teamed up with our good friend Christian Schwartz.

Munich Re Sans sports many technical features that help improve MR’s diverse and often very complex typographical applications: It is slightly narrower than the old typeface, without looking condensed, which helps to save space and paper. This is further helped by the short descenders that allow the face to set nicely at narrow line-height. However, through its relatively long ascenders, it still looks dignified and elegant. All in all, the proportions are closer to an American Gothic (Such as Franklin Gothic) while the structure is more like an European Grotesk, such as Helvetica, Univers, or the beautiful Mercator by Dick Dooijes.

We also gave the entire family tabular figures that duplex across all styles, to help with their complex and dense tables and data-heavy reports, as well as small caps for the many acronyms they use.