Marat is one of my early typefaces, and remains my favorite to this day. It was originally planned as a typeface for magazines: strong serifs and open forms for legibility at small sizes, with compact letterforms to work in narrow columns and tight headlines.
Together with cinematographer Francisco Dominguez, I made a short film for Marat. The smallest critics we could find walk across printed text at body size. To them, a paragraph looks like a billboard. And indeed, the most characterful glyphs of Marat only come into their own at display sizes. Character sits in details that readers feel without naming them.
Marat is suited to what I call “fragmented typography”: typography that has to work across many levels at once, from body text and headlines to subheads, captions, labels, and notes, often in a broad range of sizes, weights, and styles. It is the kind of typography most common today: editorial, brochures, packaging, corporate design.
Marat also works surprisingly well in bold weights, which is not always the case for serif typefaces. Part of the reason is the construction of the letters, with stress on the vertical, combined with their round forms. This gives the text a soft and friendly appearance.
The family currently consists of six weights, including italics and small caps, with extensive OpenType features such as ligatures, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and superiors and inferiors. Each font includes oldstyle and lining figures, both proportional and tabular, and a wide range of language support.
