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Berkeley Rep
Since 2005 I’ve been the art director at Berkeley Rep. When I arrived, I inherited the previous corporate typeface, Helvetica Neue. Gorgeous typeface, Helvetica Neue, if you submit to its demands. But the typeface has no small caps or alternate figures, and despite its common look it doesn’t mesh well with many other typefaces.
So after lengthy research and tryouts, we replaced Helvetica Neue with FF Kievit, a chameleon of a typeface that channels geometrics like Futura sometimes, and humanist sans like Gill Sans, Frutiger and FF Meta other times. It has enough personality to be interesting on its own, and yet it recedes nicely when paired with something else. Plus it’s packed with pretty much anything you’d want — small caps, four sets of numerals including tabular styles, fractions, and a great range of weights (though to be fair, Helvetica Neue had a wide range of weights too). As if that weren’t enough, it’s both rare enough that it feels uniquely our own and yet popular enough that it’s one of the families FontShop converted to web font formats, so Berkeley Rep could extend its brand to its website.
I switched the wordmark to Kievit (I was required to keep the clapping hands, a Landor design from 1980), got a site license for the entire staff, and have since art-directed and designed a number of logos for Berkeley Rep programs, keeping a consistent look while giving each program a unique identity.
