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Botter is Brutal Types’ contemporary technical sans – a family of seven weights with matching italics, for 14 styles in total. Type designers and frequent collaborators, David Quay and Ramiro Espinoza, built it around a contradiction: a hexagonal, modular structure whose corners are softened by rounded forms, making it rigid yet approachable.
Its starting point was a set of sketches Quay made in 2007. “The original idea was sparked by a photograph I took from the waterbus between Dordrecht and Rotterdam, while crossing the Nieuwe Maas,” he explains. “Because the photograph was taken from a distance, enlarging it caused the rectangular counters to appear subtly rounded.” He then set the prototypes aside as other work took over. The delay is ordinary enough in type design; most designers, Espinoza notes, keep “folders full of unfinished alphabets and early concepts, waiting for the right moment.” Returning to the drawings in 2026, Espinoza worked the single-weight original into a full family, refining the proportions and adding the matching italics. “The lighter weights proved to be the most challenging, as they often do,” he adds, “but we’re very pleased with how they ultimately came together.”
“At first glance, the letterforms seem almost like a visual oxymoron, combining rectilinear and rounded shapes,” Quay details, “yet by softening the outer corners, the contrast is reduced.” The balance lies in a division of labour between the outer and inner shapes: “The outer structure remains largely conventional, while the rounded inner forms define the typeface’s distinctive character.”
The name is borrowed from a boat. A botter is an eighteenth-century Dutch fishing vessel, still a common sight in Dutch cities, where many have been converted into floating homes and others kept moored in the harbours. “With their robust forms and softly rounded shapes, they embody a distinctive industrial character,” Espinoza notes. “Those qualities struck a chord with David.”
The reference points behind Botter are frankly utilitarian. Monospaced typewriter typefaces and the standardised lettering of European licence plates. It takes the mechanical character and proportions of the typewriter models, keeping the licence-plate lettering as a further reference point, staying as a proportional sans rather than a monospace. “Monospaced typefaces can influence the design of a font without it necessarily being truly monospaced,” Espinoza explains; the fixed-width grid of a monospaced design forces a set of proportions and features that a proportional typeface can borrow without taking on the constraint itself. He calls it “the best of both worlds: the unmistakable aesthetic of a monospaced design without the limitations.”
Within Brutal Types – the imprint run by Espinoza’s Retype – Botter sits a little apart from a catalogue better known for interwar-period revivals. “Botter shares many of the qualities that define the Brutal Types collection,” he notes: “a modular construction, the precision of technical drawing and a distinctly Dutch terroir.” He points the typeface towards architecture, technology, avant-garde arts and electronic music. “Botter’s unusual hexagonal contours and mechanical character naturally lend it to certain industries,” he explains, the associations drawn from years of watching how art directors use this kind of design. Those associations are ultimately subjective, though. “We wouldn’t be surprised to see Botter used on food packaging,” he adds. “In fact, we think it would look particularly good on a chocolate brand.”
An Arabic version of Botter is under development by Kamyab Jafari and Andrea Hayek, and is planned to be released before the end of 2026.