About
It started with an advert
One of Accenture's refreshed ads from 2017
First of all, who am I?
Hi, I'm Phil 👋
I'm a Product Design & Management Consultant, helping organisations create software their users love through user-centred design, storytelling, and data literacy.
This archive is my work-in-progress collection and browsing experience of every record of the Rotis font in use that I can find.
I've had a keen eye on design since I first set eyes on the user interface of Windows Vista. It radically changed my perception of what a user interface could be.
I've been designing digitally every since!
In 2017, I noticed that Accenture had a new logo
This included a complete overhaul of their brand fonts. Curious to learn what had changed, I looked into the old branding.
I discovered that their former brand font was called 'Rotis'.
Before 2017 brand refresh
Rotis Sans Serif Extra Bold
After 2017 brand refresh
Graphik Semibold
The new logo was clean and modern but I felt it lost some of the character of the old logo.
In particular, the large apertures of the 'c' and 'e' characters and the sweep of the open finials (there's a bit of typography terminology for you!) in the Rotis wordmark suggested an energy and dynamism that are lost in the tighter apertures of the Graphik wordmark.
In any case, I thought, life must go on.
But then I started seeing the Rotis font everywhere
While travelling in Singapore that November, it struck me that all of the country's street signs were typeset in Rotis too!
Spotting the Rotis font in Singapore's street signs
Diving into the history, I discovered that the font was created in 1988 by Otl Aicher and named after the village where he lived in Germany. It was groundbreaking in offering four distinct sub-families in one, including serif and sans-serif families.
Its high readability at various sizes, and its unusually diverse family of styles, meant it took Europe by storm in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Rotis font family
Inevitably however, the cycles of graphic design fashion keep turning. Rotis started falling out of fashion in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Organisations like Accenture started re-branding away from Rotis.
I remembered seeing the font everywhere in books and on posters as a kid. I even have a couple of old Rough Guides books from the late 1990s that are set in Rotis, and I think they’re still beautiful.
I decided it was worth celebrating this font and its achievement to spread throughout the world and across so many usages in such a short space of time.
So I started taking photos
Wherever I spotted the font, I took a photo.
And with almost 50 now in the collection, I decided the time was right to build a dedicated experience for browsing them.
And that's where you are today. Welcome!
Explore the full archive or stay up to date on the latest news on the development of this website.