Polin
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MISS WHITE’S STORY
The story, as Miss White told it, was not unusual in that part of the city, but to John Dean there was every element of newness in it.
He listened without interruption as the story unfolded itself.
Mrs. Marsh, Ted’s mother, had had a hard time of it. Bill Marsh had married her eighteen years ago. Bill was a good mechanic, but after about six years of happiness things began to go wrong. He lost his position and at that time work was not easy to get. Day after day he had searched for something to do. Discouraged, he had taken to drink. Then there was a day when Bill did not return. In all these years Mrs. Marsh had never heard of him. She felt he was dead, yet even that she did not know.
It was a hard struggle afterward. Sewing and washing, early and late, and many a day she went hungry, so that the two children could eat. The mother often spoke of how Ted, when eight years old, had gone out one afternoon and had not returned until seven o’clock. Without a word he had put fifteen cents on the table and then had turned to eat. He showed by the way he ate how hungry he was. After the meal was over, he explained how he had made up his mind to support the family, and so he had bought some papers; the fifteen cents was profit. His capital, also some extra pennies, was intact, so that he could buy more papers.
For several years I have been thinking about the design of a type family that explores, on the one hand, the modernist aesthetic that we know, from the Alphabet a.r. designed by Władysław Strzemiński, and on the other, to the multiscript pre-war Warsaw. This is how the idea of creating the Polin Sans typeface was born.
After researching on geometric variants of the Cyrillic alphabet, I was inspired by the text Towards an open layout: A letter to Volodya Yefimov. I was intrigued by the fact that circular forms, which we are mostly familiar with in the Bulgarian Cyrillic, can be implemented in the classical version, without disrupting the reading process. At the same time, while working on typoteka.pl, I was fascinated by the Hebrew typeface jaffa, published by the Idźkowski & Sk-a foundry, which at some points looks like the Hebrew equivalent of the Alphabet a.r..
Ben Nathan from Israel joined the project and was responsible for creating his native script. The idea of creating a multiscript family expanded to include Greek and Vietnamese. As a result, Polin Sans is a historical journey through the nooks and crannies of Polish modernism, which was created by people with diverse cultural backgrounds. The Polin Sans family was designed by Mateusz Machalski and Ben Nathan with the support of Michał Gorczyca and Małgorzata Bartosik.