Portrait is Berton Hasebe’s sharply minimalist depiction of French Renaissance types. The marriage of classical proportions with triangular Latin serifs is an inspired combination, and a fresh way to see these nearly 500-year-old forms.

Portrait draws its primary inspiration from the Two-line Double Pica Roman, equivalent to 32pt in contemporary sizes, attributed to the French punchcutter Maître Constantin (known as the Estienne Master).

The italic is a departure from the historical models, touching on hallmarks of the style, like the slightly ascending p and looped k, while remaining minimalist in nature, turning hooks into triangles and regularizing the slope angle.

Portrait Inline

Portrait Inline, a beautiful and decorative style, building on the inscriptional quality of the capital proportions. Inline Regular takes the minimalism present in Portrait to its logical extreme: sharply tapering outer strokes play against monoline inner strokes, with all extraneous detailing stripped away. The Inline Sans takes the structure of the Inline Serif, exposing the geometric underpinnings of the proportions, while adding a dimensional element through its overlapping strokes.

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Portrait’s author’s Berton Hasebe moved from Hawaii to study and work in Los Angeles, obtaining a BA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2005. In 2007 he moved to the Netherlands to study type design through the TypeMedia Masters course at The Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (KABK). Berton has resided in New York since 2008, and he was a staff designer with Commercial Type from 2008 to 2013, when he left to start his own studio.

Portrait Cyrillic was designed by Ilya Ruderman (CSTM Fonts).