Golt—a Berlin typeface in its own right

Synthesizing diverse typographic influences drawn from Berlin’s urban landscape, Golt fuses characteristics from various typographic styles into a coherent and original design system.

Berlin’s historic street signage was originally designed by Herbert Thannhäuser around 1942. Its shapes are inspired by a typeface that was widely used in the early 20th century: Erbar Grotesk, released by Ludwig & Mayer in 1926. 

Notably, already the first sketches of Thannhäuser’s street signage typeface features two characteristic ligatures commonly found in Berlin’s street signage: the German Eszett (ß) and the tz ligature.

Golt draws on a range of influences from Berlin’s typographic landscape: straight stroke endings as well as other historic details of Berlins street signage on the one hand, and relatively wide proportions found in historic metro signage (particularly along the U8 line) on the other hand.

The historic lettering at the
Gneisenaustraße metro station served as a reference for the design of Golt’s uppercase G. While Golt features vertical stroke terminals and a more uniform overall appearance, the proportions of the G remain closely aligned with its historical model.

Golt keeps the historic construction of the German Eszett (ß) as a stylistic alternate—in its own proportions, of course. This detail has also been preserved in the 1990s redesign by Andreas Frohloff.

Apart from rather wide proportions, Golt also shares other details with the typeface originally used along the U8 line: sharp corners in M or z, angled top stroke in t, or bevelled joints where round and straight shapes meet.

In addition to the conventional, diagonally descending y①, one of the most characteristic features of the historical typeface used in old Berlin street signs is its lowercase y with a straight descender. ② This alternative construction was incorporated into the development of Golt.

Andreas Frohloff’s 1990s revision displays noticeably more conventional forms like the Frutiger-like a—and a lowercase y with diagonal descenders.③

Although based on a popular design (Erbar Grotesk) the historic design of Berlin’s street signs reveals a lot of interesting details with many glyph-level deviations. This is most notably seen in the use of two totally different proportions of the uppercase G—especially striking when signs with similar names are mounted pretty close to each other.

The lowercase a sometimes features an oval counterpunch①, sometimes the counterpunch features edges where the bowl meets the stem.② Differences can also be seen quite obviously in the proportions of the lower case s: ① displays a rather wide construction that is a lot more closed on the top, whereas ② features a narrower and more open construction.