The Challenge of Institutional Typography

When Uni Konstanz approached us to develop a typographic system, the brief was deceptively simple: create something that feels both academic and alive. Universities carry enormous visual weight — decades of tradition, published research, official communication — and the typography has to hold that without becoming stiff.

We started by studying how the institution communicates at scale. Posters, semester programs, signage, digital interfaces. Each channel had its own informal typographic logic — some rational, some accidental. Our job was to find the thread that connected them and make it intentional.

System Before Style

The decision to anchor everything in a single typeface family was both a constraint and a gift. Rather than mixing display and body faces, we pushed the family through its optical sizes, weight extremes, and spacing variations. The discipline of staying within one family forced a kind of compositional thinking — rhythm, contrast, and hierarchy had to come from relationship, not from novelty.

The result is a system that scales from a research publication headline down to a footnote, from a 10-meter campus banner to a 12px UI label — all without losing coherence. That kind of range is what institutional typography demands.