Christian Schwartz was still at college when he designed a poster using Bell Centennial , whose incisions looked highly absurd at a size of 10cm. What in Bell’s case was purely functional became a stylistic devise in Schwartz’ typeface Amplitude.

The large number of fonts may seem excessive, but each has its own role to play. Book, Regular, Medium and Bold are equal to any task in body text, guaranteeing users the right answer to questions of background colour, saturation and positive/negative printing. Light, Black and Ultra come into their own as headline fonts.


Amplitude Extra Compressed was designed for the tightly set credits on film posters, which are often very difficult to read (Image: Walt Disney Pictures)

When it came to his Extra Compressed font, though, Schwartz had a very particular area of application in mind: “I’d like to see it used at the bottom of film posters, for the credits, which are always set very tightly and almost impossible to read.” And thus the stylistic feature became a functional one again after all.


Amplitude on the cover of Vibe