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.”

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.”