The idea was born in Amsterdam when one of our colleagues took the official electric taxi at the Schiphol airport. At the moment we were thinking about creating a new wide sans serif, and an interesting question emerged during the trip: what font would be associated with autonomous electric transport. Then we thought it would also be nice to expand this theme visually.
This is how the font family TT Autonomous came about. It is a modern brutal technological sans serif. The basic visual characteristic of the typeface is the noticeable squareness of the characters and angular internal space. In addition, the typeface proportions tend to appear monospaced, but they are not really monospaced. The width of the characters is inspired by automobile logotype proportions, which are mostly rather wide.
We could not disregard the fact that code lines in software for autonomous cars are traditionally typed using monospaced fonts and added a special monospaced subfamily to the TT Autonomous typeface. Thanks to the squareness of the characters inherited from the main family and the real monospace properties, the character forms in the subfamily turned out very specific and interesting. This is especially true for oblique monospaced fonts, which are true italics.
In addition, we created a couple of outline styles which are great for use in titles and large inscriptions and perfectly match the basic family and the monospaced family. As opposed to outlines that can be created in graphic editors, in TT Autonomous Outline we worked through the narrow and questionable spots, thanks to which the font looks professionally complete and harmonious.
As from the very beginning, the font was developed with tomorrow’s technologies in mind, we could not miss addressing variability and creating a variable font. TT Autonomous has variable versions for both the basic and the monospaced subfamilies.
TT Autonomous is a complex font family that consists of 32 fonts intended to solve a broad range of design tasks. Overall, the font family features 14 regular styles, 6 monospaced styles, 7 reversed styles, 2 outline styles and 3 variable fonts. The number of glyphs varies from 630+ in the monospaced font to 790+ in the basic styles. The basic subfamily has alternates, ligatures, old-style figures, slashed zeroes, and many other useful features.
