A sinew is a strong, fibrous tissue connecting bones to muscle. Much like its anatomical influence, Sinew Sans—also available in an expanded professional version on Gestalten Fonts—provides that connection: the balance between static geometric construction and the characteristics of dynamic humanist typefaces. The font offers a lot of features and alternate glyphs for many typographical applications.

A self-professed addict—but luckily only to design glyphs, alphabets, and OpenType programming—German font designer Jakob Runge works as a freelance type and corporate designer, runs type workshops, and has set up a platform to encourage and promote type drafts by students. All that, and he's still hard at work on his master's degree. Jakob's style is influenced by a clean and modest approach, which he rightly also considers to be a foundation for fine type design. 

Could you give us a brief introduction to yourself and to your work?
I’m completely addicted to design glyphs, letterings, alphabets, and programming OpenType feature. I’m the co-founder of www.26plus-zeichen.de, a web platform to encourage student type drafts, while I continue working on my master’s degree at the Muthesius Academy in the German city of Kiel. Aside from studying, I work as a freelance type and corporate designer and also run type workshops.

Please provide us with a short description of the font.
Sinews Sans is a contemporary square sans, combining a technical armature covered by decent curves and distinctive warmth. Moreover, open apertures provide high legibility in both text and display settings. Its broad typographical palette offers a wide range of applications. To enable a modern typographic standard, Sinews Sans covers West and Middle European languages with some OpenType features for a reasonable price. The professional version Sinews Sans Pro, which is only slightly more expensive, extends the typographic possibilities much more.

What was the main idea behind designing the font?
The fundamental idea while starting the design process of Sinews Sans was to create a modern sans serif characterized by simplicity, but bringing along a lot of decent details and features as well. Furthermore, I had in mind to find a balance between static geometric construction and the characteristics of dynamic humanist typefaces.

How would you characterize your style?
Aside from creating fonts, by designing corporate identities or other visual graphics, I often focus on solutions involving a lot of typography. By now my style is influenced by a clean and modest approach, which is a root for fine type design as well.

How did you come up with the name of the font?
Well, as my typeface is a geometric armature covered by decent curved diagonals that implicate dynamic strength, I chose a name from a topic which is technical, but also organic: anatomy. A sinew (also known as a tendon) is a strong fibrous tissue connecting bones to muscle. This was just the right metaphor to carry the idea of my typeface.

Can you describe some particular mannerism that distinguishes Sinews?
As already mentioned, Sinews Sans has subtle curved diagonals to make the typeface more vigorous and stable. I also pay a lot of attention to every single letter and its details in order to refine the technical construction. Another characteristic are some truncated edges. I cut off some corners to emphasize a calligraphic stroke, even in a technical sans. Also, the missing edges are placed to create fine gray values: They work like ink traps. The typeface in general has a slight masculine appearance, which contrasts with the very wispy hairline weight for larger point sizes, lending the font family an elegant and filigree side.

Can you tell us something about the process of developing Sinews? Did you have some particular inspirations?
Sinews Sans is not the first typeface I created, but it is the first real font family I produced professionally. So I did analyze quite a lot of type milestones to get a feeling for shape and balance. The typeface itself was mainly designed on screen; nevertheless, I used prints for the fine-tuning.

You have made a large amount of special characters. Can you tell us more about those extra signs and the OpenType features?
Indeed, I spend a lot of research on the diacritics, including a lot of currency symbols, while adding some alternate letters and small caps. This involved plenty of additional work during final font production with around 750 glyphs for each weight, but it was worthwhile: There is a  single-story a and g, a tailed l for signage, a bellied y, and several alternates for the ampersand. Furthermore, Sinews Sans supports 25 OpenType features like lining and tabular figures, arbitrary fractions, as well as arrows and many others. My favorite is the stylistic set 06: It creates a mixture of small caps and lowercase letters and enables a unicase alphabet for prominent display text.

We have noticed that the italic weights appear with some very unique elements. How did that originate?
Well, to keep up the technical appearance most square sans have an oblique version of the upright font only. With Sinews Sans I decided to create a true italic, which comes with a lot of handwritten characteristics. So nearly every glyph was re-drawn, and previously-existing curved diagonals were amplified to bring up more distinctive charm to the italics.

What is the ideal usage of your font?
Sinews Sans offers a lot of features and alternate glyphs for many typographical applications. The small caps and the ratio between light and bolder weights are optimized for display usage. Therefore, in editorial design and visual identities Sinews Sans will achieve the best scores.

Finally, tell us about your future plans and projects.
I was totally excited while turning the regular weights intp true italic shapes, so my next step is to design Sinews Script. It should become an exaggeration of the italics in a highly playful manner. Independently, for me it's time to take a shot at Antiqua faces.