Franziska doesn’t want to be reduced to simple, predictable characteristics, but she knows exactly who she is. Made with a dance of delicately balanced detail, her richness can surprise you again and again. From the slight asymmetry of her serifs, derived from hand-drawn letterforms; to the tension between sharp edges and soft forms visible in the clipped ball terminals and square-but-round dots; or the exaggerated ink-traps that stand out large and in clarify small; her community of lively details form a unified, balanced whole.

The italic styles are individual. With a gentle slant, they combine calligraphic construction, playful handwritten forms and angular elements. True to the idea that italics are typefaces in their own right — a partner to the roman, not subordinate to it — in Franziska the shape of almost every italic character has been redrawn.

Somewhere between a serif and a slab typeface, Franziska was designed to work in print and on screen. Her open, approachable design has been tried and tested in printed daily newspapers and across online magazines that embrace text-heavy content. Irrespective of medium, Franziska makes appealing typography easy.

Working with other typefaces, Franziska can be a modest teamplayer for longform text. Working alone, she can be the versatile orchestrator of complex typographic hierarchies.

Franziska’s hybrid origins become evident when looking at all her weights together. To enable different effects, the thinnest weights tend towards a monolinear Egyptian, while the darkest are more like high-contrast Romans. The weights at different extremes belong to different genres and work as display versions of the text weights found in the middle.

Franziska provides all the OpenType features needed for ambitious typography: her Roman features small caps and the capitals-to-small caps feature for fine typography, and her italics include many cursive ligatures. These come alongside a variety of figure styles and beautiful dingbats and symbols complement the design. Like all TypeMates fonts, extensive Latin language support comes as standard.

Franziska began during Jakob’s masters at Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, Germany, conducted under the guidance of Albert-Jan Pool and Prof. André Heers. At the end of the MA, the design impressed Erik Spiekermann and she lived at FontFont as “FF Franziska” for 10 years.

She is dedicated to the real life Franziska. Before Jakob got enthusiastic about serifs, he met her already.