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Bitter

Designed by Sol Matas

About

People read and interact with text on screens more and more each day. What happens on screen ends up being more important than what comes out of the printer. With the accelerating popularity of electronic books, type designers are working hard to seek out the ideal designs for reading on screen.

Motivated by her love for the pixel, Sol Matas designed Bitter. A "contemporary" slab serif typeface for text, it is specially designed for comfortably reading on any computer or device. The robust design started from the austerity of the pixel grid, based on rational rather than emotional principles. It combines the large x-heights and legibility of the humanistic tradition with subtle characteristics in the characters that inject a certain rhythm to flowing texts.

Bitter has little variation in stroke weight and the Regular style is thicker than a usual ‘Regular’ style for print design. This generates an intense color in paragraphs, accentuated by the serifs that are as thick as strokes with square terminals.

Each glyph is carefully designed with an excellent curve quality added to the first stage of the design, that was entirely made in a pixel grid. The typeface is balanced and manually spaced to use very few kerning pairs.

To contribute, see github.com/solmatas/BitterPro .

Designer

Sol lives and breathes type design in her beloved adopted city of Berlin. From her sunny studio, she collaborates with an international type and design community. Type design found and claimed her during her formative years at Universidad de Buenos Aires. She mingled and shared classes with architects, and those technical ideas infused her design methodology with the functional precision of an engineer. After spending time at Saatchi & Saatchi, she set out on her own, and formed a new studio. Client projects have led her to research glyphs for Cyrillic, Greek, Oriya, and Devanagari, uncovering the history and meaning of the strokes.

solmatas.com

Choosing type

When you have some text, how can you choose a typeface? Many people—professional designers included—go through an app’s font menu until we find one we like. But the aim of this Google Fonts Knowledge module is to show that there are many considerations that can improve our type choices. By setting some useful constraints to aid our type selection, we can also develop a critical eye for analyzing type along the way.

Bitter - Google Fonts