Typography: Exemplar by Letters from Sweden
Letters from Sweden has unveiled Exemplar, an expansive multi-script typography family thirty years in the making and carved into Italian Carrara marble.
In 1994, type designer Göran Söderström began sketching letterforms on a Power Macintosh 7100. Over the course of three decades, those early digital drawings were drafted, refined, and redrawn across multiple eras of type design software. Completed in 2026, Exemplar represents a comprehensive multi-script typographic system encompassing Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts. The family spans five weights with matching italics, delivering ten distinct styles and 1,018 glyphs that together support 370 languages worldwide. Each letterform balances classical epigraphic proportions with contemporary optical corrections, featuring calibrated stroke contrast and sculpted terminals.
Thirty Years of Typographic Craft Set in Stone
To commemorate the completion of the project, Letters from Sweden sought an enduring physical medium rather than relying solely on ephemeral digital specimens. The foundry journeyed to Pietrasanta, Tuscany, the historic center of Italian stone carving nestled near the Carrara marble quarries. There, skilled artisans translated Exemplar’s digital vector outlines into three authentic street signs carved from solid white Carrara marble blocks. Working with traditional steel chisels and wooden mallets, the carvers incised crisp Roman capitals and fluid lowercase letterforms, producing deep V-cut incisions that capture raking natural sunlight with sculptural presence.
The digital presentation of the typeface matches this material dedication. Digital design studio Here-Now created a minimalist specimen website featuring dark-mode interactive testing environments, responsive weight sliders, and vector Bézier outline inspectors. Visitors can test all weights in real-time, toggle between historical stylistic sets honoring 1994, 2008, and 2026 iterations, and inspect complex Arabic ligatures alongside extended Cyrillic characters. An accompanying documentary film chronicles the journey from early vector points to the dust-covered stone carver’s bench in Pietrasanta. By anchoring thirty years of typographic research in both classical stone inscriptions and responsive screen applications, Exemplar bridges ancient epigraphic permanence with modern digital utility.
Explore the interactive specimen on Exemplar from Sweden, discover the type foundry at Letters from Sweden, and view the digital craftsmanship by Here-Now.
