Larish Neue
Radim Pesko · Radim Peško · 2011
A contemporary display serif built from the Vienna Secession's rejected drafts, carrying the faint genetic trace of a 1903 Viennese humanist into something sharper and wholly its own.
About
Larish Neue began as the road not taken during Peško's 2006 Larish Alte revival – experimental letterforms the Vienna Secession passed on, reworked on different construction principles into a standalone release in 2011. The connection to its Plinius ancestor is present but buried; what reads on the surface is a confident, slightly idiosyncratic serif with character in the details, particularly the lowercase f. With only a Semibold and its Italic, it is a narrow tool – but one with genuine point of view, used to strong effect by Pitchfork, Sternberg Press and Jay-Z's visual identity team.
Classification
Descended from the rejected experimental drafts Peško produced alongside Larish Alte in 2006, which itself digitised Rudolf von Larisch's 1903 humanist serif Plinius for the Vienna Secession. Larish Neue uses entirely different construction principles from Larish Alte – the historical DNA reads only on close inspection – and arrives at something more contemporary and assertive. Limited to a single Semibold weight with accompanying Italic; designed for headline and display use rather than text.