About Wolpe Tempest

Wolpe Tempest is part of The Wolpe Collection of typefaces, and like it’s original design, sets itself apart from formal and static sans-serif italic type designs. The Wolpe Collection celebrates Berthold Wolpe’s outstanding body of work, and includes five iconic typefaces, digitized and updated by Toshi Omagari of the Monotype Studio.

Berthold Wolpe saw book jackets as small posters, whose job was to make an immediate impact in a busy and competitive visual field. Tempest Titling, as it was known, was one of the typefaces that grew out of Wolpe’s hand-lettering for a Fanfare Press book cover. It shares some similar DNA with Wolpe’s best known typeface, Albertus, but it has a personality and energy all its own.

Digitizing Tempest for the first time, Toshi made no changes to Wolpe’s basic alphabet, but created a small group of alternate letters with extravagant swashes – flourishes on entry and exit strokes – for adding extra dash to book titles, logotypes and headlines. He also developed regular, bold and black weights, taking care to preserve the original Tempest’s unmistakable profile and skeleton. “You can’t go too thin because the round endings disappear, and they are what give Tempest its character. The energy of the strokes diminishes with weight.”