TypeMates round out the iconic Cera Super Family with their release of Cera Mono

With the introduction of its sleek monospaced font, TypeMates have completed the final piece of the Cera Super Family puzzle – an extensive collection of typefaces that have been meticulously developed and expanded over the past decade. To mark the release of Cera Mono, we caught up with the Berlin-based foundry to delve into the origins of the project and trace the evolution of their renowned type family.

Cera’s journey began in 2015 when Jakob Runge, a founding partner at TypeMates, felt a welcome change was needed after years of working on his detailed and diverse master’s thesis. He introduced Cera Pro as a geometric sans serif typeface that supported Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, a refreshing change in the typographic landscape and was embraced for its clear geometry and balanced utility. “Cera’s geometry has humanist influence,” explains Nils Thomsen, a founding partner and type designer at TypeMates. “Like how Antiqua text fonts have quite small uppercase letters, or a ‘Q’ with a prominent tail. Also letters like ‘a’ and ‘e’ are kind of human. The result is a clean and geometric face that brings along elegance and a certain warmth – a friendly attitude and classic details.”

Since its inception, the Cera Super Family has evolved into a vast collection of typefaces, including Cera Stencil, Cera Brush, Cera Round and Cera Mono. Each typeface has its own unique story and was developed in collaboration with various designers. For instance, Cera Stencil was designed to elevate stencil types beyond cargo and military clichés, whereas Cera Brush was introduced to bring a hand-crafted, brush-made geometric font with high-res details. The latter was created with the help of Max Kostopoulos, an art director in Munich with a strong focus on analogue design techniques. “Several versions of letters were drawn with different brushes,” explains Runge, describing the process behind it, “and some studies on the optimal conversion of the analogue grayscale images into monochrome vectors were necessary to realise Cera Brush.” According to Kostopoulos, the OpenType ligature feature has been coded to ensure these variations are used automatically, rotating three variants of each letter in a rhythm that further mixes consonants and vowels.

In 2016, Lisa Fischbach joined TypeMates as a full partner and developed a round variant of Cera – featuring circular stroke endings and softly rounded corners. “For me, it seems like it should have been easy to make a rounded version of Cera,” she says. “Use a filter named ‘Round Corners’ and job done: beer time! Cheers! But it wasn’t that simple.” The team had to navigate various hurdles such as managing overshooting to ‘just round’ the original and dealing with the different stroke endings between Cera Pro and Cera Round. The goal was to ensure both typefaces shared the same letter widths to maintain kerning consistency.

For TypeMates’ 5th anniversary in 2020, a new weight of Cera Round Shine was introduced, boasting a playful, comic-inspired light reflection. “This was just a fun font to see how the effect works and to exaggerate the round style of Cera Round – the letters were inflated like balloon modelling animals,” notes Fischbach.

The next gem in the collection, Cera Mono, made its debut in 2024, finally realising the long-standing plans of a monospaced typeface. This font brings a fresh, circular charm to the usually rigid monospaced genre, blending technical precision with a warm, approachable vibe. The team worked with Antonia Cornelius – a researcher, lecturer and type designer with a keen eye for legibility and readability – who played a pivotal role in bringing Cera Mono to life. “When starting a new typeface project, of course, you start scanning the market,” Cornelius tells us, reflecting on the project. “For Cera Mono, we looked for monospaced designs that take a slightly different, more human approach to this genre. Toshi Omagari’s Codelia and Space Type’s Monochromic are the friendliest monospaced typefaces we ran into. Klim’s The Future Mono is the most geometric monospace we discovered. For Cera Mono, we needed something somewhere in between. A great resource for observing how a specific design idea can be adapted to different scripts was IBM Plex Mono, which is part of a stunning superfamily.”

Looking back, type designer and font developer Natalie Rauch notes that the extensions and improvements made to the superfamily over the years have provided great learnings on how to collaborate with other type designers and when to recognise that others are the better experts. These lessons learned through the years of Cera's development – particularly the importance of collaboration with native script experts – have shaped TypeMates’ workflow and positioned the foundry to handle large custom font solutions. Currently, in order to avoid a “Hollywood-esque prequel and sequel franchise game,” Runge reveals that they have stopped expanding and now focus on optimising and updating the existing font files.