Pitch
Light
Add type sampleRegular
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Add type sampleBold
Add type sampleLight Italic
Add type sampleRegular Italic
Add type sampleMedium Italic
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Add type sampleCredits
- Classification
- Serif, Slab Serif
- Original Format
- Digital
- Distributor(s)
- Add
- Tags
- display, monospace, slab, typewriter
Background
Pitch is a love letter to the typewriter.
A typewriter has a singular purpose: putting letters onto a page. Put the paper in, stab away at the keys and letters instantly appear. It is tactile, analogue, immediate. The German «Schreibmaschinen» means “typewriter”, and upon closer inspection is literally composed of the words “writing machine”. For me this is the perfect definition for a typewriter.
With a legacy of functionality, romance and literary seriousness, writers and journalists used typewriters to great effect. No formatting, no typographic styling: just the writer and their words. It’s a humble, beautiful object, a representation of mechanical refinement and industrial design. It is an honest machine, it does exactly what you tell it.
The honest aesthetic of the typewritten text these writing machines produce is wonderful. I wanted to capture this particular aesthetic with Pitch. The aesthetics of typewritten text are largely due to three things: monospacing, type style, and the artefacts of struck paper.
Monospacing.
Monospacing was initially a mechanical necessity for typewriters. In short, each letter takes up exactly the same amount of horizontal space. The opposite of monospacing is “proportional” spacing, which is what the majority of typefaces have. Having a fixed width allowed the typewriter engineers a predictable unit of measure to advance the strike. When a key is pressed, a letter strikes the paper and the carriage moves along a fixed distance.
Melior