Tausend by Fontwerk is a new grotesque with a thousand ideas behind it

Berlin-based foundry Fontwerk has released Tausend, a confident and characterful type family that builds on the legacy of German grotesques while gently poking at their limits. Designed by Christoph Koeberlin and Gabriel Richter, the new collection is bringing a dose of precision, playfulness and typographic potential.

The process began, as it often does in type design, with a single letter: a. While sketching for an earlier typeface, Koeberlin landed on a version of the lowercase ‘a’ that didn’t quite fit the brief. It was clean and pared-back, in line with the neutral grotesque tradition, but there was something else going on too. A soft curve. A slight lean. A smile, even. The detail was small, but intriguing enough to spark a bigger idea.

Enter Tausend. Developed in collaboration with Gabriel, the typeface builds on that early sketch and expands it into a complete system. It is a true design partnership, one that brought Christoph’s eye for structure together with Gabriel’s more expressive instincts. Working from their respective studios in Berlin and Fukuoka, they refined the typeface over time, making decisions about width, rhythm, stroke contrast and shape. The result is a font that feels considered but not cautious, modern but not cold.

So what exactly does Tausend offer? In short, flexibility. The collection spans six subfamilies, from the standard version to Plakat, Soft, Plakat Soft, Stencil and Shaded. Each has its own texture and tone and uses variable font technology, meaning weight, width and style can be adjusted on the fly, with 1000 options built in.

Better yet, we found that Tausend is designed with usability in mind. Optical sizes are built into the family, which means text looks just as good at six point as it does on a billboard. The typeface conforms to DIN 91379, a character encoding standard that ensures compatibility with all official EU languages and several others beyond. For brands, institutions and organisations working across borders, it’s a practical detail with real creative implications.

But there’s personality here too. Tausend is described by Koeberlin as “brutally honest, proud and confident,” traits that come through clearly in the design. At lighter weights it reads as soft and spacious and at heavier settings, particularly the ultra-bold Too Black styles, it becomes denser and more expressive. Particularly, the Shaded and Stencil variants add a layer of experimentation, with options for shadow play, texture and contrast.

As for the name, Tausend means thousand, which Fontwerk use to make reference to the thousand glyphs, thousand weights, and thousand possibilities contained in the collection. It’s also a nod to Berlin’s former postal code and the shared history between its two designers. A reminder, perhaps, that even the most complex ideas can begin with something small.

Tausend is available now on Fontwerk.com, with the full collection offered as a free trial. Unlike most demos, Fontwerk’s Trial Fonts are identical to the full version in character set and functionality, with only a few currency symbols removed and a “FwTrial” label added to the name. For those looking to take things further, the Shaded style is also available as a full version for free under Fontwerk’s Base License, covering one user, 10,000 web pageviews a month, and up to 10,000 social media followers. Now that’s a font we can get behind.