Located in the heart of Berlin, Juliasys is the Carelian type foundry of designer Julia Sysmäläinen. Working hard to get quality and humor together in type design, Julia’s days are filled working as a senior designer at Edenspiekermann while publishing typefaces through Berlin’s FontFont, Moscow’s Art. Lebedev Studio and of course, her own foundry. She has worked on major corporate design projects, designing websites and print publications as well as thousands of icons and dingbats. Having studied both linguistics and graphic design, she often develops fonts that represent “writing” in all its possible meanings — typefaces based on the handwriting of authors and artists.

“My first somewhat serious preoccupation with language began with my passion for reading — mainly Finnish and Russian literature,” she said in her Creative Characters interview. “Later I discovered that besides literary content and literary form there was also the visual shape of the text. What fascinates me most is where it all comes together — in manuscripts, letters, everything that has been written down. And this promptly brings us to my typefaces, which are often based on just this kind of material.”

FF Mister K, a complete type family based on Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, is her best known of these typefaces. “Originality, authenticity, and honesty are crucial qualities to me,” she said. “I think Mr. K has all of that, just like Frank Kafka’s manuscripts do. When I was working on it, I realized that while Mister K is a font, it is also the visualization of a personality.” Julia took a similar approach when designing Emily In White. Her inspiration for this typeface came from a series of poems by Emily Dickinson that were written on “fascicles” – slips of paper that Dickinson had sewn to booklets together.

Each of Julia’s typefaces has a personality and voice all its own, and each was designed with a particular use in mind. “I sometimes have the impression that there are now more wonderfully legible text fonts than texts worth reading,” Julia said. “To make a text typeface, which, after a quote from Jan Tschichold, should serve any text “like a good servant… silent and smooth” — well, I’m probably not the best placed designer for that. I like having at least some influence on how my typefaces are used.”