Based in Santiago, London, and Barcelona, W Type Foundry started under the label, Without Foundry, when it was originally established. Beginning around 2016, the foundry shifted to its current shape and it has been consistently working to craft versatile and expressive type families for an international design marketplace ever since.

Formed by Magdalena (Bana) Arasanz, Patricio Truenos, Diego Aravena, and David Súid, W Type Foundry has extensive experience in typography, understanding its role in everything from graphic design to branding, identity, advertising, art direction, and beyond.

W Type Foundry has had work selected for the Latin American Typography Biennale, a conference event that celebrates and promotes Latin American typography, in 2014 and again in 2016. The 2018 Biennial saw both Magdalena and Patricio serving as Regional event creatives, coordinators, and producers.

W Type Foundry actively takes part in lectures, workshops, and classes relating to various aspects of working in the field of type design. They have also collaborated with a growing number of designers and typographers to not only expand the foundry’s collection of type designs but to share their vast wealth of knowledge with the type designers of tomorrow.

Over the years since it was founded, W Type Foundry has built an impressive library of type families that include a varied array of formal serifs, contemporary sans serifs, strong display typefaces, and even brush scripts. Their work focuses on modern design aesthetics that offer a high degree of flexibility through OpenType and extensive multilingual support for an international audience.

One of W Type Foundry’s more recent releases is Armin Soft, a sibling to its 2019 release, Armin Grotesk. Both type families were designed by David Súid.

The Armin type family was designed and named as an homage to Armin Hofmann, a Swiss graphic designer whose work in typography, logotypes, symbols, signage, and beyond, helped to set the standard for the signature minimalist Swiss style. 

“As a graphic designer, sometimes it’s impossible not to be inspired by the Swiss style, specifically the work of Armin Hofmann, who is one of its best exponents,” David said.

“Grids and grotesk and neo-grotesk typefaces are a fundamental part of the tools that make this aesthetic possible,” he continued, adding that the visual language of the Swiss style is one that has earned admiration for many years.

Armin Soft is the softest version of the Armin family, featuring subtly rounded corners that lend a warmer tone to its visual presentation. Like its grotesk sibling, Armin Soft carries the same eclectic touches added through stylistic sets applied to several of its characters. This was done to make Armin “suitable for the creation of any visual language,” the foundry said.

Armin Soft matches its grotesk predecessor in its range of weights, making it the perfect companion in every way. Available in Thin, UltraLight, Normal, Regular, SemiBold, UltraBold, and Black, with corresponding italics for each, Armin Soft is also offered in a Variable font that provides graphic designers with every iteration of the type family in one convenient file.

The full range of weights included with Armin Soft makes it perfect for everything from bold displays and signage to headlines, editorials, print and digital publishing applications, advertising, logos, product packaging and informational inserts, merchandise, apparel designs, marketing materials, corporate communications, white papers, infographics, websites, and mobile applications. It’s a great choice for branding and identity projects that need a strong yet friendly sans serif at the helm.

Designed to be versatile, Armin Soft provides additional features through OpenType that include case-sensitive forms, fractions, standard and discretionary ligatures, ordinals, scientific inferiors, subscript, superscript, tabular figures, and stylistic alternates. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, and Dutch for design projects intended for an international audience.

W Type Foundry currently offers 33 products through YouWorkForThem, an array of serifs, slab serifs, sans serifs, brush scripts, and display fonts to suit projects of any kind. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and bookmark it so you can check back for new additions over time!