Olaf Nicolai: Nicolai modular font

«Glasarchitektur» printed in Nicolai

Following up on yesterday's post about Lineto, here is one of the experimental type projects they’ve released: Nicolai is a modular font, commissioned as an art project for the exhibition Museutopia in the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Germany. The theme of the exhibition was «Utopia». The artist Olaf Nicolai responded to this brief by commissioning Lineto co-founder Stephan Müller to create a font according to his specifications.

Stylistically reminiscent of typographic experiments from the de Stijl movement, the Nicolai font composes letters by using blocks of 3 colors. The colors can be specified by the user using a Shockwave application which outputs EPS. The application can be tested from the Nicolai product page.

For the Museumtopia exhibition Olaf Nicolai used the font to reissue a utopian architectural essay («Glasarchitektur» by Paul Scheerbart), and to print a quote by Karl Marx on a museum wall.