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FF Real™ Head

by FontFont
Individual Styles from $50.99 USD
Complete family of 65 fonts: $314.99 USD
FF Real Head Font Family was designed by Erik Spiekermann, Ralph du Carrois, Anja Meiners and published by FontFont. FF Real Head contains 65 styles and family package options.

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Per Style:

$4.84 USD

Pack of 65 styles:

$314.99 USD

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About FF Real Head Font Family



FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style from between 1998 and 1908, but with much more warmth and improved legibility as well as a hint towards the warmer American grotesques. Later on, not just slanted styles, but a “proper” italic version was added inspired by the way Roman and Italic are distinguished in traditional serif faces.


NEW: a specially created set of obliques were added in 2018 to give designers more design flexibility, for those looking for a less calligraphic look.

In 2020 the family was extended with matching condensed weights.


FF Real was originally conceived by Erik Spiekermann as one text weight and one headline weight to be used as the only faces in his biography ‘Hello I am Erik’, edited by Johannes Erler, published in 2014. While Spiekermann drew the alphabets, he passed on the font data to Ralph du Carrois and Anja Meiners who cleaned it up and completed it. In the meantime, FF Real has been extended to a family of two styles and 65 weights each.


The design of FF Real is rooted in early static grotesques from the turn of the century. Several German type foundries – among them the Berlin-based foundries Theinhardt and H. Berthold AG – released such designs between 1898 and 1908. The semi-bold weight of a poster-size typeface that was lighter than most of the according semi-bolds in metal type at the time, gave the impetus to FF Real’s regular weight. In the words of Spiekermann, the historical example is “the real, non-fake version, as it were, the royal sans serif face“, thus giving his new typeface the name “Real” (which is also in keeping with his four-letter names, i.e. FF Meta, FF Unit).


FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style, but with much more warmth and improved legibility. With a hint towards the warmer American grotesques, Spiekermann added those typical Anglo-American features such as a three-story ‘g’ and an ‘8’ with a more defined loop. To better distinguish characters in small text sizes, FF Real Text comes in old style figures, ‘f’ and ‘t’ are wider, the capital ‘I’ is equipped with serifs, as is the lowercase ‘l’. What’s more, i-dots and all punctuation are round.

Designers: Erik Spiekermann, Ralph du Carrois, Anja Meiners

Publisher: FontFont

Foundry: FontFont

Design Owner: FontFont

MyFonts debut: Nov 17, 2015

FF Real™ Head is a trademark of Monotype GmbH and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. FF is a trademark of Monotype GmbH registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain other jurisdictions.

About FontFont

Based in the trendy district of Kreuzberg in Berlin, Germany, FontFont was established in 1990 when FontShop founder Erik Spiekermann and fellow type designer Neville Brody wanted to build a foundry where type was made for designers, by designers; a place where type designers were given a fair and friendly offer and where true type magic was made. “From the very beginning,” representatives of the foundry say, “we wanted to bend the rules and test typographic boundaries, to build a library with a collection like no other; a range of typefaces that had different styles, different purposes, that was contemporary, experimental, unorthodox, and radical.”

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