Xenois, Erik Faulhaber’s Third Powerful Family

There are common themes that run through each of Erik Faulhaber’s typeface designs: breadth of family size, applicability to a wide range of uses, and a search for character perfection. His Generis design is a system of four compatible families of slab serif, serif, sans serif and a “simple” sans in the spirit of American gothic typefaces. Faulhaber’s goal for Generis was to develop a suite of “generic” designs that could be used for a variety of design projects.

Generis was followed by the Aeonis family; a very large collection of typefaces inspired by Greek lapidary inscriptions and modern industrial design. Again, minimalist character construction and a variety of weights and proportions provide for typographic versatility. The newest offering from Faulhaber, his Xenois design, is the beginnings of a large super family of typefaces aimed at solving a diversity of typographic problems.

According to Faulhaber, “I melded the basic design characteristics of Generis and Aeonis to create the foundation for the Xenois family. The result is a typeface collection that is sufficiently large enough to be used in a multitude of design projects, distinctive in its individual character designs – yet minimalist in structure.”

The sub-families within the Xenois series interrelate perfectly. Proportions and underlying character shapes are completely compatible within all the designs. They have a common and obvious design bond, yet each is able to stand on its own as a distinct typestyle.

Simple shapes, a large x-height and squared shoulders, mark Xenois. Each sub-family is comprised of five weights from light to heavy, and all have companion italics. Xenois Sans is a design reduced to its simplest character shapes. Xenois Serif has serifs – but they are small, and only the most essential to ease of reading have been included in the design. Xenois Semi echoes the shapes and proportions of Xenois Sans but stroke weights have been modulated.

The complete Xenois family is available as desktop fonts from the Fonts.com and Linotype.com websites. It is also available for online use through subscriptions to the Fonts.com Web Fonts service.

Click here to learn more about – and to license – the Xenois family.

Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.