FS Albert Narrow is a narrow version of FS Albert Pro, designed by Jason Smith. But, drawn from scratch, it’s more like a font in its own right, as Jason Smith explains. “The challenge in designing a narrow version of a typeface based on an existing design is not to make it to look squashed. “There comes a point in condensing a font where it becomes broken. You can usually automatically squash something by 10% and it will still look OK. But by the time you’ve squashed it by 25% the type looks ugly and needs redrawing. So we drew it all manually in order to ensure the design integrity was kept while still fulfilling the need to save space.”

2003. Fontsmith was sharing a small, cold, whitewashed studio space in Northburgh Street, Clerkenwell. But things were on the up following prestigious custom type commissions for The Post Office and E4. “Slab serifs were on the brink of another revival, we could feel it,” says Jason Smith. “All we wanted to do was have a play with these slabs, go as far as we could within what was acceptable and readable.” “It wasn’t initially clear what was happening,” recalls Phil Garnham. “We were becoming very influenced by our surroundings, outside the studio space. We absorbed the essence and the designer grime of where we were.”

Fyodor provides powerful headlines and dramatic titling for editorial projects. The typeface design features balanced oblong and square geometric spaces, inside the classic forms of the Constructivist-era typefaces. The font family comes in 274 characters with Latin, Western European, Cyrillic and Greek language support, and is available in a bold weight with regular, condensed and expanded styles, both normal and oblique.

How do you make a font like FS Albert unique, distinctive? “When designing a font I try to question every letter,” says Jason Smith, “but all you need is a few that have an x factor. With FS Albert, they’re the lowercase ‘a’ and ‘g’ and the uppercase ‘I’ and ‘J’. “I remember a friend saying, ‘Why on earth have you designed the ‘a’ like that? Isn’t it too friendly for this kind of font?’ And, in a way, that’s what I wanted – honesty and warmth, because a lot of big brands at the time really needed to show a more human side.”