Excon

Story

Alisa Nowak’s Excon is a versatile six-weight family of sans serif fonts; it is also a tribute to the work of the master French designer Roger Excoffon (1910–1983). Excon’s letters are top-heavy, a rarely-explored idea in type design Excoffon himself experimented with decades ago. He was followed in this later by a few colleagues in The Netherlands. By referencing Excoffon’s style, Excon’s design drinks from the fountain of French-style sans serifs from the 1950s and 60s. Excon is an excellent choice for corporate identity and editorial design work. The typeface’s letters include some stroke contrast – otherwise their top-heaviness would not be visible – and other typical mid-20th-century traits, like its mixing of a double-storey ‘a’ with a single-storey ‘g’. The stroke contrast is dialled-down in the family’s lightest Thin weight, but by the Black, the contrast is quite pronounced in many characters. Excon’s lowercase has a tall x-height, paired with ascenders that are noticeably taller than the capital letters. Its numerals are proportionally-spaced, and drawn to be as tall as Excon’s caps.