Charlotte Rohde’s new typeface has heart-dotted i’s and a plan to overwrite problematic men

When we last caught up with Berlin-based artist and type designer Charlotte Rohde she was just wrapping up her MFA at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. “I’ve grown up a bit since then, now I’m 34, a retired Typography and Type Design professor, a published author and have done some major custom typefaces, such as for the dating app Feeld, the Kanal-Centre Pompidou and the HKW in Berlin,” the designer tell us.

Although Charlotte is now much further into her career than she was during her thesis, her latest release, Oficía Mono, does draw on some of the ideas that defined her master’s research, exploring typefaces, visual voice and extensions of the body. It’s based on a character, one that the designer has decided to make the protagonist of her new sci-fi fintech feminist novel. Before the idea for her new novel, though, came a lettering job for a Mercedes Campaign back in 2022.

“I made one of my early grotesks into a mono that I had expanded because I liked where it was going, and it became one weight (light), which ended up being available on Solitype, but after the fundraiser was over, it went into the drawer again,” Charlotte says. Last year the designer pulled the project out of the archive again and moulded it into something else entirely, birthing Oficía Mono – a letterset and a woman in her own right – an office siren with a corporate world of her own. “She’s professional, but also cute and girly – she has the heart-dotted i’s.”

The typeface has also recently been given an after-work life with the bold new release of Oficía Poly. Stylistically, the project was informed by two existing typefaces: Antique Olive and Gill Sans. “Gill Sans Ultra Black is such a fun typeface, especially the moment with the i’s, but Eric Gill himself is a highly problematic character (if you don’t know, go to his Wikipedia page),” Charlotte says. “So I wanted to create a typeface that fills the need for Gill Sans – to overwrite that very problematic man by my female hand.”

When Oficía Mono was set to be released, Charlotte teamed up with designer Tina Lehmkuhl with the vague idea of producing some kind of specimen for the typeface to demonstrate how Oficía looks and behaves. “But by then, Oficía already felt like much more than a typeface. She had become a character,” Charlotte says. “I've been working for a while with my artistic persona, Charlotte Rohde™ – a ‘good woman’ who constantly negotiates professionalism, agreeableness and female-coded emotionality in the workplace,” the designer explains. “Giving my typefaces personalities is part of that practice.”

Oficía is a girlboss: “she navigates professional structures with confidence while hiding a wink in plain sight — only visible if you look closely, like her heart-shaped i dots. She asks how much emotion women are allowed to bring into professional spaces before it starts being perceived as unprofessional.” So instead of making a conventional specimen around such a letterset, the pair reimagined the format as not just a publication but a performance, installation and live print event, inviting a group of writers to contribute “fictional ‘performance reviews’ of Charlotte Rohde™ – workplace evaluations that together became the content of the specimen,” the designer says.

Since then Oficía has further escaped the more rigid boundaries of type design promotion and become the protagonist for Charlotte’s latest novel in the form of a character called Oficía Greif: “a hedge fund manager who speculates on the value of words,” she tells us. “The novel imagines a world in which language is no longer a commons but a financial asset. Words are trademarked, traded in funds, and their value fluctuates according to cultural demand and market speculation.” The book’s fictional framework has become a container for many of the questions Charlotte has been exploring in her visual work surrounding femininity, post-structuralism, pop culture and economics. It just happened to come out of her first mono: “Oficía had a personality, she demanded a publication that could introduce her properly.”