Christian Schwartz and Berton Hasebe initially designed Feature for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Diagonal stress, mismatched contrast between main strokes and serifs, and sharply angled head serifs conspire to give the face tension, dynamism, and immediacy. Times-ish at a glance, it introduces subtle, lighthearted twists and turns that make it anything but default. It knows how to deliver seriousness, but also serious fun, and is beautiful almost in spite of itself—a plucky flower pushing through a crack in concrete.

When novelist Hanya Yanagihara took over as editor in chief of T in 2017, she conceived of a visually dense publication bursting with words. She and creative director Patrick Li set out to rethink the book from the ground up, including the type. They wanted a flexible system of typefaces that would not only perform convincingly in a fashion context, but would also help questions of culture and style be met with the same sense of urgency that deeply reported news stories would. The result was Feature and its sans counterpart, the blunt, unconventional Review.

Without descending into nostalgia or pastiche, the new typefaces tapped into a wildly inventive period in the sixties and seventies that produced Herb Lubalin’s provocative covers for fact; Francesco Simoncini and Wilhelm Bilz’s 1965 typeface Life; Brendel Type Studio / Typeshop Collection’s tightly spaced display version of Times New Roman called Riccione, from the seventies; low-budget zines hastily thrown together with Letraset and paste-up strips of phototype; and various incarnations of Times New Roman from PLINC (Photo-Lettering, Inc.) in New York.

Feature balances both newsiness and style with an unusual contrast (relatively low in the main strokes, higher in the serifs) that gives the face a distinctive rhythm in blocks of text. With three optical sizes—Display, Deck, and Text—the family has been expanded for this release by Hrvoje Živčić, who filled in character sets, extended the weight range, and drew italics for the whole collection. Display and Deck Condensed, currently available in prerelease form in the Vault, are coming soon.

3 families, 30 styles

Individual styles start at $50. A family license for Feature Display starts at $350, Feature Deck starts at $300, and Feature Text starts at $200. A collection license starts at $650, a savings of $200.

Trial fonts available at no charge.

More Typefaces

Review

Review first appeared alongside Feature in T, designed to work in perfect harmony with matched vertical proportions and contrasting shapes. A deliberate strategy of shearing offshoots and blunting exterior curves begets a productive tension with the face’s round counters—and also encourages tight setting and stacking for creating dramatic walls of text. At smaller sizes, Review remains fluently legible and readable thanks to open counters and a high x-height. Berton Hasebe drew this blocky, unorthodox sans with assistance from Tim Ripper.

The Vault

Open for business: the Commercial Type Vault, an archive of many years’ worth of previously unreleased typefaces. In the spirit of working in public and sharing our process, we’re thrilled to make these fonts, long available to friends and family, accessible to anyone and everyone. Vault projects run the gamut from finished families waiting for release to works in progress, old custom projects, and even rough-hewn experiments. Consider the Vault the backstage area to the Commercial Type and Commercial Classics catalogs.

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