Fontsmith’s typographic reimaginings spread to Lurpak. As butter goes, there’s nothing quite like it. Lactic, pale in colour with a delicate, gently creamy flavour, Lurpak complements and enhances food, never dominating, yet nonetheless adding its own special qualities.
But its existing type style was felt to be too aggressive for such a smooth eating experience. Fontsmith were asked to produce a custom font that would project a new, more sympathetic feel for the brand; gentler on the eye, but with an inner strength. It would have to perform equally well both in headlines on advertising hoardings and in the packaging small print on the undersides of tubs and the backs of wrappers.
‘Being a Danish brand, we wanted to steer a course well clear of the rural reassurance of traditional English and Irish butter imagery,’ says Jason Smith. The ambience is more Chelsea than Cotswolds.’
In typographic terms that meant looking modern, easy to read, with clear, open forms and a good overall weight to deal with the extreme sizes of Lurpak’s usage requirements. ‘But we wanted to keep things simple, to fulfil that brief using just three weights rather than, say, nine,’ Jason points out.
Working in tandem with design group Golden, Fontsmith explored different options that might work best with the brand; letterforms became softer, harder or squarer as they sought the right balance. Three variations were finally offered, and the chosen route was developed into Lurpak Sans Light, followed by regular and bold weights. The result is characterful but relatively quirk-free: a small tail on the lower case g, the sloped terminal of the arm of the k – a key letter, appearing as it does at the end of the brand name. But beyond that Lurpak Sans relies for its character on its large x-height, open forms and the distinctive shapes of its counters – the ‘holes’ in the letters – formed as the curved strokes hit the verticals. It’s a design that achieves the difficult combination of being both friendly and sophisticated, bringing a generous helping of the right kind of warmth to the every supermarket chiller cabinet.
