New Atten Round

I found inspiration for this design in a voice—that of world-renowned broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

When I was young my paper route led past the pond where Attenborough discovered his fascination with the natural world, and, like so many other Britons, I grew up with Attenborough’s natural-history programs. His gentle, measured diction became a key part of family life and an indelible part of the fabric of British society and culture.

While enjoying a documentary one day, I realised that Attenborough’s delivery had the precise qualities that I was aiming for in a new and then un-named typeface. I wanted to achieve a noticeable charm and a personable tone, while still preserving the integrity of the text. Now I had my archetype and a name for the design – Atten.

The design had began as part of a deep exploration of rounded typefaces, and with New Atten I infused as much long text reading comfort into a rounded sans serif as possible. The humanistic structure and classical capital proportions are timeless. Punctuation and symbols are optimised for text sizes, and our Accessibility Set™ includes differentiating forms for capital ‘I’ and lowercase ‘l’, and when combined with the Stylistic Set 2’s infant ‘a’ and ‘g’ make a New Atten an excellent choice for children’s books. Stylistic Set 3 adds the elegantly minimal 1 seen in Edward Johnston’s London Transport typeface.

We believe New Atten Round to be the only rounded monolinea sans suitable for extended reading.